Meet Paul Alexander, the polio patient who has spent over 7 decades inside an iron lung

For 77-year-old Paul Alexander, home is a 600-pound iron lung that has helped him live for more than seven decades. He has earned the name “Polio Paul” and is one of the most striking cases of the disabling disease having spent almost the entirety of his life inside the iron lung. 

While he made headlines in recent years and became the Guinness World Records' longest iron lung patient this March, his ordeal began several decades ago. According to the New York Post, Alexander contracted polio in 1952, when he was just six years old. 

At the time, the United States was going through its worst outbreak of the disease with nearly 58,000 cases, mostly children. Polio targets a person's motor neurons in the spinal cord and makes them too weak to carry out basic human functions such as breathing on their own.

In Alexander's case, he was paralysed from the neck down. To help his chances of surviving, he received an emergency tracheotomy and was put inside an iron lung. Since then, the neck-to-toe ventilator has helped him breathe and live. But the 77-year-old's machine is outdated because it was first invented in 1928. 

Why is the iron lung dear to Paul Alexander? 

Since then, several medical advancements have come, but Alexander refuses to leave his iron lung and upgrade to better, less hassle-free machines. In a conversation with The Guardian in 2020, he said that by the time the newer machines came, he had gotten used to his “old iron horse."

Another reason for his preference for the old machine is that he does not wish to get another hole in his throat, a requirement for many new devices. Nevertheless, Alexander has achieved a lot in his polio-stricken life. He has learned how to breathe for short periods of time outside the iron lung, and has also pursued writing and law. “I never gave up, and I’m [still] not going to,” he said in 2021.