20A Sunday, May 27, 2018
com The Dallas Morning News
Caregiver and friend Kathryn Gaines washes Paul Alexander’s face. She answered his ad about 30 years ago: “Disabled professional seeking part-time help.”
In iron lung, he earned 2 degrees
Continued from Page 1A
where he earned his bachelor’s and law
degrees, students crowded his open
dorm door and gawked. Later, clients
visiting his home waited awhile before
they ultimately asked: What is that
thing you’re in? Is it a sauna?
No, he would say. It’s an iron lung. I
had polio as a kid.
Then, some would ask: What’s
polio?
‘The horror of the day’
No one makes iron lungs anymore.
Barely a handful of people still use the
hulking respirators, which apply nega-
tive pressure to enable breathing for
those unable to do so on their own.
Alexander, 72, is among the few.
The semi-retired bankruptcy lawyer
has been using one since he was 6, his
lungs and muscles ravaged by paralytic
polio. He’s a living reminder of a time
when fears of the crippling, infectious
disease gripped the country and par-
ents kept kids away from playmates,
pools and birthday parties for so much
as a sniffle.
“Polio was the horror of the day,”
Alexander says, his speech punctuated
with clicks, wheezes and silent breaks
as he pauses to gulp in air. “It was like
the Black Plague.”
The disease destroys nerve cells in
the spinal cord. It spread silently,
explained Steve Cochi, senior adviser
at the global immunization division of
the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. For every one person who
contracted paralytic polio, another
200 might display few or no symp-
toms.
“It was a disease that terrorized a
community,” Cochi said. Its most
The Dallas Morn-
ing News fea-
tured young
Paul at 9 in 1955.
“I like to paint,
go on picnics
and go to
church,” he said.
He contracted
polio before
he’d had the
chance to start
elementary
school.
M dallasnews.
famous victim was President Franklin
D. Roosevelt.
Until1955, when Jonas Salk be-
came a hero by developing the vaccine
that would largely eradicate the dis-
ease globally, polio reached pandemic
levels. The worst year was1952, ac-
cording to PolioToday.org, with nearly
58,000 reported cases causing 3,100
deaths and leaving more than 21,000
in varying stages of paralysis.
That summer, on a hot and rainy
day, 6-year-old Paul Alexander was
playing outside his Pleasant Grove
home, when he suddenly felt like going
back inside.
As he walked in, dripping and
muddy, he said, he let the screen door
slam — an act that would normally
draw scolding from his mom, who was
mopping the kitchen.
Instead, she saw him and her face
froze. “Oh, my God,” he remembers her
saying.
She told Paul to run out and get his
shoes. When he came back in, she
cleaned him up and told him to go to
bed.
“She knew instantly,” he says. He
still wonders how.
He was pampered. His parents
brought him crayons and coloring
books featuring his beloved cowboys.
It was pretty great, though he had the
sense something wasn’t right. And so
he colored, page after page, like there
would be no tomorrow.
Life in a machine
Inside his canary-yellow machine
in his Love Field-area home, Alexan-
der’s rigid body lies under a white
sheet, fingernails long as talons and
resting on his chest. He depends on a
caregiver to help him eat, wash his face
in the morning, brush his teeth and
shave. He can be bathed, or his sheets
adjusted, through portholes on the
machine’s sides.
On the table, his head is ringed by
technology linking him to the outside
world — a computer, a push-button
telephone, an Amazon Echo. What’s
the Echo for? He grins. “Rock ’n’ roll,”
he says.
Closer to Alexander’s face, a straw
pokes from a tall water cup; on his
chin rests one end of a long, plastic
T-square-like implement that he
operates with his mouth, pecking out
emails or answering and hanging up
the phone.
It’s been about 30 years since his
longtime caretaker, Kathryn Gaines,
answered Alexander’s newspaper ad:
“Disabled professional seeking part-
time help.”
When other caretakers flaked, she
stepped up. Eventually, she moved in.
For15 years they lived together,
then Gaines moved next door, and
now she lives down the block. “We just
kind of get along,” she says. “I haven’t
killed him yet.”
One typical morning, she showed
up at 7, Alexander’s human alarm
clock, and gathered the implements of
his morning routine, starting with a
toothbrush, a metal bowl and a glass
of water.
Gaines brushed his front teeth,
then let Alexander take over as he
worked the brush around his back
teeth with practiced movements. She
put the straw to his mouth; he took a
swig from the glass and swirled before
ejecting the wash back through the
straw into the metal bowl.
Similar routines followed as she
rubbed his face with a wet towel and
lathered him up for a shave, the two
A mechanical wheel is used to adjust the respiration rate on Alexander’s
iron lung, which hasn’t been mass-produced for half a century. Using exist-
ing parts and a few he crafted himself, Brady Richard of northwest Dallas
put together Alexander’s current canary-yellow machine after the previ-
ous one began to leak.
File Photo /Staff
reading each other’s body language.
Like an old married couple, they’ve
had their moments, but Gaines has
proved reliable where others haven’t.
“People need people,” she says.
Breathing like a fish
As young Paul’s polio set in, his
back and neck stiffened and pain shot
through his limbs; by the next day, he
said, he was hallucinating, with a high
fever. By week’s end, he was too weak
to sit on the toilet.
“My hands were gone,” he says. “I
couldn’t color.”
The family had kept Paul home
after their doctor suggested he’d be
better off recovering there than at a
hospital teeming with sick kids. But
when the practically immobile boy had
trouble breathing, it seemed he
wouldn’t be among the lucky ones
whose symptoms eventually passed.
He was rushed to the hospital,
where he underwent a tracheotomy
and woke up in a plastic, steam-filled
tent. By then, he was already in an iron
lung, with no idea what was happen-
ing. “I figured I’d gone to hell,” he says.
Doctors tried to get him to breathe
on his own, but their sink-or-swim
methods were terrifying to him and
unsuccessful. It would be18 months
before he went home, paralyzed from
the neck down.
With the help of a physical thera-
pist, Paul gradually overcame fears of
breathing on his own and learned to
gulp for air — “kind of like a fish,” he
says. “I was using my throat muscles
and my tongue to gulp in breath and
swallow it into my lungs.”
Motivated by the prospect of a
puppy, he learned to breathe for three
minutes at a time, and eventually for
Smiley N. Pool/Staff Photographer
A20 M 05-27-2018 Set: 18:48:35
Sent by: alozoya@dallasnews.com News
Smiley N. Pool/Staff Photographer
much of his waking day. “It’s exhaust-
ing,” he says. “People think I’m chew-
ing gum. I’ve developed it into an art.”
But for a boy who wanted nothing
more than to go to school, it was a
turning point.
“I knew that was the road to a fu-
ture,” he says. “To become something.”
‘Basic and bulletproof’
Iron lungs haven’t been mass-
produced for half a century, and insur-
ance stopped covering Alexander’s
repairs long ago. His chest muscles too
damaged to use the portable ventila-
tors that have become common for
others with breathing issues, he’s
dependent on a nearly obsolete ma-
chine.
When his iron lung began to leak
air several years ago and he found it
hard to breathe, he didn’t know whom
to call.
Around the same time, Brady Rich-
ard, whose boyhood how-does-this-
work curiosity led him to launch Envi-
ronmental Testing Laboratory in
northwest Dallas, was trying to cobble
together a working iron lung from the
shells of others abandoned in a nearby
workshop.
“I like old stuff, so I read up on it,” he
says, not knowing who might need it.
About a month later, a woman
came into Richard’s business, which
tests machinery and technology under
simulated weather and seismic condi-
tions, and asked if he had any iron
lungs. A guy she knew named Paul
Alexander really needed one.
Alexander’s existing machine was
“flat worn out,” Richard says.
Using existing parts and a few he
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