09/29/2026
At 6 years old, Paul Alexander entered an iron lung because polio had left him unable to breathe on his own.
More than 70 years later, he was still using the same type of machine. 🫁
But the life he built outside that steel cylinder was something doctors could never have predicted.
Paul contracted polio in Texas in 1952, during one of the worst outbreaks in American history.
Within days, he could no longer move his arms or legs.
Then he lost the ability to breathe.
Doctors placed his body inside an iron lung, a large mechanical respirator that changed the air pressure around him and forced his lungs to expand and contract.
Paul was only 6.
At first, even leaving the machine seemed almost impossible.
Then a therapist challenged him.
If Paul could learn to breathe without the iron lung for three minutes, she would give him a puppy. 🐕
It took him nearly a year.
But Paul eventually mastered a technique he called “frog breathing,” using muscles in his mouth and throat to push air into his lungs.
He got the puppy.
And those three minutes eventually became hours outside the machine.
That changed everything.
Paul finished high school, went to college and earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1978. 🎓
Then he did something even more unexpected.
He went to law school.
In 1984, Paul earned his law degree from the University of Texas School of Law, and two years later he was admitted to the Texas Bar.
The boy doctors once struggled simply to keep alive became an attorney. ⚖️
Paul practiced law for nearly three decades, handling cases while living with paralysis from the neck down.
He wrote by holding a pen in his mouth.
Later, he spent years creating his autobiography the same way, eventually publishing Three Minutes for a Dog in 2020. 📖
Technology changed dramatically during Paul's lifetime.
The iron lung did not.
He continued relying on the old machine, repairing it and finding replacement parts long after hospitals had stopped routinely using them.
Eventually, he began sharing his life online too, introducing a new generation to a disease many people had only encountered in history books. 📱
Paul Alexander died on March 11, 2024, at 78 years old.
Polio took almost all voluntary movement from his body when he was 6.
It never decided what he would do with the next seven decades.
If someone had looked at that little boy inside an iron lung in 1952, how many would have imagined he would one day graduate from law school, become an attorney and write his own life story?
