Every now and then, we hear about people with such extraordinary spirits who defy the odds in such remarkable ways that their life stories can renew our faith in life itself. Such people occasionally become the subjects of feature films, such as Jean-Dominique Bauby, the French editor of Elle magazine who suffered from locked-in syndrome and whose story of learning how to write through blinking was dramatized in the 2007 film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Or Christy Brown, the quadriplegic Irish artist and author who learned how to use his left foot to paint and write and whose life story was portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis in the Oscar-winning 1989 movie My Left Foot. Such cinematic immortalization may be in the offing for Paul Alexander, the polio survivor and author who managed to live a full life despite spending the vast majority of his existence inside an iron lung.
Alexander was born in Dallas on Jan. 30, 1946. One day, after having played outdoors for a bit too long in the smoldering Texas heat, he came back home with a fever so severe that his parents immediately took him to the hospital. After several rounds of testing, their worst fears were confirmed: Their 6-year-old son had polio.
Unless we have read Philip Roth’s novel Nemesis recently, we may have forgotten how nightmarish polio was in the early part of the 20th century. Receiving a polio diagnosis in the 1940s and early ’50s was like receiving an AIDS diagnosis in the 1980s or contracting smallpox in the 1780s — a near-death sentence that, if it did not kill its victim, could leave him or her paralyzed for the rest of his or her life.
Alexander survived, but only barely. After several months and several near-death experiences, his parents were able to take him back home from the hospital. But Alexander would never again have a fully functioning body. And because he could not breathe on his own, he was placed in an iron lung, a yellow tubular contraption in which he’d be fated to live for the rest of his life. Now an odd, unfamiliar sight to most of us — striking us, perhaps, as a cross between an MRI machine and a Jules Verne invention — the iron lung was a state-of-the-art piece of medical technology of its day that allowed those with respiratory difficulties to live slightly longer than they otherwise would. For Alexander, the appliance, though looking like it might have been a prop from a steampunk movie, permitted him to live until the age of 78 — longer, in fact, than anyone in an iron lung had ever lived before.
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For the first two years following his polio diagnosis, Alexander could not even try to take breaths on his own. But believing that Alexander might be able to when he was 8, his caregiver coaxed him to try by promising to get him a puppy if he succeeded in taking a few breaths without the assistance of the iron lung. He did so by forcing himself to guzzle air “like a fish” taking in water and holding it inside his lungs. Eventually, he was able to breathe without the iron lung for up to three minutes and was awarded with the promised puppy for his efforts. His story of how he learned to breathe again became the basis for his 2020 book, Three Minutes for a Dog: My Life in an Iron Lung. Learning how to write proved to be an equally arduous task. Alexander did so in part through dictation, in part through mastering how to control a pen with his mouth, and in part through wielding a plastic stick in his mouth to type letters one by one on a keyboard.
After being homeschooled in Dallas, Alexander graduated as one of the top students in his W.W. Samuell High School class and then attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he would earn both his bachelor’s degree and a law degree. Within the past year, Alexander became an unexpected social media sensation when his TikTok videos about his life (which others helped him create) garnered hundreds of thousands of views. So much of Alexander’s life may have been unexpected, but he never lost his appreciation for how wondrous and unexpected any life is at all, in whatever form it happens to take. As he told one of his viewers, “Life is such an extraordinary thing. Just hold on.”
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School. His latest book, Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America, was published this summer by the University of Alabama Press.