Paul’s death was announced Tuesday on a GoFundMe page set up to help pay for his housing and health care expenses. “It’s absolutely incredible to read all the comments and know that so many people were inspired by Paul. I am so grateful,” Paul’s brother Philip said on the GoFundMe page.
The exact cause of Paul’s death is unclear. He was hospitalized for a Covid-19 infection three weeks ago but tested negative this week, Phillips said.
Paul contracted polio in the summer of 1952 at the age of 6. It was the height of the polio epidemic; according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were more than 21,000 cases of paralytic polio in the US that year.
Today, polio is considered eradicated in the United States thanks to vaccines that were developed in the late 1950s, according to the CDC.
The disease left Paul paralyzed from the neck down and unable to breathe on his own. He was placed in an “iron lung” – a large metal cylinder in which the air pressure changes to stimulate breathing – according to his autobiography.
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“The doctors told us that Paul would not live,” says Paul’s mother, Doris Alexander, in her autobiography. “There were a few times when the power went out and the lungs had to be operated by hand. Neighbors came to us and helped.”
Paul spent the next seven decades in an “iron lung”. In March 2023, Guinness World Records declared him the world’s longest-surviving iron lung patient.
Paul’s ambition was not limited by his condition. He learned breathing techniques that allowed him to leave the “iron lung” for a few hours. He graduated from college, earned a law degree and practiced law for 30 years.
He also self-published his autobiography, Three Dog Minutes: My Years in an Iron Lung, named after the achievement of learning to breathe on his own for at least three minutes, an achievement that took him a year to master and was bought for dog, as the book says.
In January, he created the ‘Polio Paul’ TikTok account, where he chronicled his life’s achievements and answered questions about life in an iron lung, such as “How do you go to the toilet?” and “How do you manage to stay so positive?”. At the time of his death, he had 300,000 followers and over 4.5 million likes.
2024-03-14 06:35:58
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