22/10/2025
#знакипожиттю
He couldn’t move a muscle. But he moved the world.
In 1952, six-year-old Paul Alexander from Dallas was struck by polio — paralyzed within days, unable to breathe without help.
Doctors placed him in an iron lung, a yellow chamber that breathed for him when his own body couldn’t.
They said he wouldn’t last a week. He lasted a lifetime.
Paul learned “frog breathing,” gulping air with his throat muscles just to steal moments of freedom outside the machine.
Those minutes became decades of determination.
He finished school, earned a law degree, and built a full legal career — all from inside his iron lung.
Fact: he spent more than 70 years inside that machine — the last person on Earth to rely on one full-time.
In 2020, he published Three Minutes for a Dog, writing, “My life is incredible. Even though I can’t move, I’ve achieved everything I ever wanted.”
Paul Alexander passed away in 2024, aged 78.
It’s less a story about limitation, more about legacy — proof that strength isn’t in movement, but in meaning.
Because even when the body is still, the spirit can keep breathing for the world.
Source: BBC News (2024), The Washington Post (2024), The Guardian (2024)
