Mr. Alexander was recently hospitalized for treatment of covid-19, his social media site said. He was later released.
Mr. Alexander, a native of Dallas, contracted polio in 1952 when he was 6. Within days, he was nearly fully paralyzed and close to death, unable to breathe on his own. A doctor performed an emergency tracheotomy to suction congestion from the boy’s lungs.
He awoke with his body inside an iron lung, a device that used air pressure to help patients breathe after paralysis of their chest muscles. “I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t yell. I couldn’t cry,” Mr. Alexander told the podcast “Pandemia” in 2022. “I couldn’t do anything.”
As polio cases rose in the 1940s and ’50s, some hospital wards in the United States had rows of iron lungs. In 1955, a polio vaccine developed by virologist Jonas E. Salk was approved for general use after a year of extensive field tests that involved more than 1 million schoolchildren.
Mr. Alexander eventually regained his ability to speak and developed techniques to breathe on his own, and spent increasing periods outside the iron lung. “I gulped in the air and swallowed it with my lungs,” he said.
He received a high school diploma at 21 with the help of a tutor who was by Mr. Alexander’s side for years. He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas in 1978, then received a law degree in 1984, and worked as a lawyer for decades. He often spent much of the day outside the iron lung, but he was never fully free of the device.
As his health deteriorated in recent years, Mr. Alexander needed increasing amounts of time inside the chamber.
The title of his self-published memoir in 2020, “Three Minutes for a Dog: My Life in an Iron Lung,” describes his first attempts to breathe on his own as a boy after returning from the hospital inside the iron lung. As a reward for his effort, he received a pet dog. The book took him eight years to finish, sometimes dictating passages or using a plastic stick to tap on a keyboard.
For the medical community, Mr. Alexander was a bridge to another era. He was among the last patients to use an iron lung and, at times, needed help to find replacement parts for his machine. Some iron lungs were found stored away as forgotten relics.
“I’ve found them in barns. I found them in garages. I’ve found them in junk shops,” he said in a 2017 interview. “Not much, but enough to scrounge [for] parts.”
In 2015, Mr. Alexander posted a video on YouTube seeking help to fix his iron lung. Someone who had an old machine in his garage was able to make the repairs.
“My life was a combination of one … adventure, miracle — whatever you want to call it — after another,” he once said.
“It’s a rather simple machine,” Alexander explained. “Give me electricity and I’m okay.”
First appeared on www.washingtonpost.com