Polio Put Him in an Iron Lung at Six. He Lived There Almost 72 Years — and Still Became a Lawyer.

Paul Richard Alexander was six in 1952 when poliomyelitis paralyzed him from the neck down. Doctors put him in an iron lung, a yellow metal cylinder that squeezed air in and out of his chest. He was not expected to last. He lasted until March 11, 2024. He was 78. Guinness recognized him as the person who had used an iron lung the longest. For most of those decades the machine was home, office and bed.

He learned a frog-breath — gulp air, force it down — so he could leave the tank for hours. A therapist once promised him a puppy if he could stay out for three minutes. It took a year.

That bargain became the title of the memoir he published in 2020, Three Minutes for a Dog, tapped out with a stick in his mouth or dictated to a friend. He finished high school with near-straight As. He earned an economics degree and, in 1984, a law degree from the University of Texas at Austin. In 1986 he was admitted to the Texas bar. He practiced for decades, including in court, a man who could not move his body arguing other people’s cases.

Late in life he went on TikTok. Hundreds of thousands watched the face at the end of the cylinder talk about work, faith, loneliness, and the advice he gave strangers who wrote in despair: hold on. He had been hospitalized with COVID-19 weeks before he died in Dallas; the precise cause was not settled in early reports. One of the last people still living inside that technology was gone. What remained was the record of a career built in a machine that was supposed to be a waiting room for death.

Sources

• New York Times, AP, CNN and BBC obituaries (March 2024)
• The Guardian interviews and death notice
• Wikipedia compilation of dates (born Jan. 30, 1946; polio 1952; J.D. 1984; Texas bar 1986; memoir 2020; died March 11, 2024)