Paul Alexander, who was almost completely paralyzed by polio, assured everyone that he considered himself a happy man.
Photo: www.youtube.com
Life often treats people unfairly: illnesses and injuries limit their freedom, make the healthy sick, and chain them to beds and wheelchairs.
Poliomyelitis is an incurable disease that can only be prevented through vaccination. The virus attacks the human nervous system very quickly and often causes paralysis, almost always irreversible. In 10% of cases, this disease is fatal. Until the middle of the last century, polio killed and maimed children around the world. And only in 1961, thanks to Soviet immunologists who developed an effective vaccine, this terrible disease was defeated.
FATAL BAD LUCK
In the United States, a man recently died who was forced to spend 72 of the 78 years he lived in a narrow pressure chamber. But Paul Alexander, who was almost completely paralyzed by polio, assured everyone that he considered himself a happy man.
Paul always said that if he was unlucky in this life, it was only a little, because polio overtook him in 1952, several years before children around the world began being vaccinated against this infection. In fact, Paul became one of the last Americans to suffer from this disease in a particularly serious way.
That year, a polio outbreak killed more than 3,000 children in the United States, even though the country was under strict quarantine. The hospitals were overcrowded, so when 6-year-old Paul suddenly developed a fever, the doctor who responded to the call advised his parents not to go to the hospital. The boy was getting worse, he could not move his arms or legs and suffered from an intense fever. And only when the child began to choke, the parents took him to the nearest hospital.
SALVATION PRAISE
The doctors immediately made the correct diagnosis and sadly told his father and mother that the boy would not survive. But Paul’s father, holding his choking son in his arms, knelt down and one of the doctors, dropping everything, took the boy to the operating room, where he cleared the mucus from his airways.
Paul’s life was saved, but he was left almost completely paralyzed. Even the muscles involved in the respiratory process failed and the young patient, like many other children with the same diagnosis, was admitted to the so-called hospital. “iron lung”: a voluminous sealed capsule the length of a man, from which only the head protrudes. Pumps create a pressure inside the chamber that is different from atmospheric pressure and reduce or increase it. Thanks to this, air enters and leaves the patient’s lungs.
Paul’s life was saved, but he was left almost completely paralyzed.
Photo: wikimedia.org
THIRST FOR LIFE
Pablo didn’t remember anything. He woke up in a large chamber, in an iron cocoon. And he saw that dozens of other teenagers were lying on the same devices next to him.
During the year and a half he spent in the hospital, the boy lost many of his roommates: patients forced to use “iron lungs” often died from suffocation on their own saliva: they were paralyzed and could not swallow it. “Every time he made a friend, he died,” Alexander recalled. But Paul did not give up and was eventually discharged home with strict instructions never to leave the pressure chamber.
But he himself could not do it: the boy was completely paralyzed. His mother and father supported Paul in every way possible as he tried to somehow learn to breathe on his own again. And one day he felt that he had managed to swallow air and push it into his lungs. The parents began to motivate his son to develop this technique, which they called “frog breathing.” And soon Paul, in a wheelchair, was able to leave the cocoon for a couple of hours a day. They bought him a puppy that he played with in the yard. The American titled his memoirs, published in his final years, “Three Minutes for a Dog.” In them he admitted that he found a “second wind” thanks to the desire to be with his four-legged friend.
STUDY TO BE A LAWYER
The father made his son several devices, holding them in his mouth, on which the boy could write and draw. Paul graduated not only from high school, passing exams at home, but also from the University of Texas, and then also graduated. school. In addition, he studied law and moved from his parents’ house to the university campus. Of course, along with the pressure chamber in which he did my homework. In lectures he dispensed with it and breathed in a way that he himself invented.
After obtaining his law license, Paul Alexander began seeking clients. And clients immediately flocked to him in large numbers, people were confident that a person with such a will could solve any of his problems.
Even before entering university, she was on the verge of getting married, but the marriage was disrupted by the girl’s mother, who forbade the young couple from dating. Because of this, the closest people in Paul’s life were his caregivers. One of them, Katie Gaines, spent more than 30 years with him. Paul’s brother Philip even suggested that they were secretly married, but Gaines always denied it.
MOMENT OF GLORY
Paul Alexander gained worldwide fame after a video with his participation appeared on YouTube. By then the man was already retired and his savings were coming to an end. It took a lot of money to replace parts and repair old “iron lungs”. Paul flatly refused to change them for more comfortable modern models, saying that he was used to the cocoon of him. And people from all over the world started sending him money. They, as Paul’s relatives reported, “were enough for a man who spent his entire life in an iron cylinder, who loved long conversations and laughter, to complete his earthly journey with dignity.”
***
HAVE YOU HAD POLIOMYELITIS:
– American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt;
– artist Frida Kahlo;
– director Francis Ford Coppola;
– science fiction writer Arthur Clarke;
– founder of the Mars chocolate factory, Franklin Mars.
– American actress Mia Farrow
