Unquenchable spirit: ‘Three Minutes for a Dog…My Life in an Iron Lung’ by Paul R Alexander

Imagine being six years old, coming in after a day spent playing outside in the heat of a Texan summer’s day. You are hot, much hotter than normal even on a warm day like this. You have a sudden, terrible headache. Then your neck becomes stiff and painful.

Your mother notices and you see the fear – no, terror – in her face.

It is 1952 and the childhood disease called polio has been stalking the land, including your neighbourhood, striking down children of all ages without warning. You have become its latest victim.

The next two years are a blur of agony, misery and confusion in a hospital ward alongside numberless other polio patients. Because of the damage inflicted by the virus on your little body, you are now almost completely paralysed. Your lungs are unable to function on their own and you now exist in a machine known as an ‘iron lung’ which does the breathing for you. The only part of your body that protrudes from this metal cylinder is your head. An emergency tracheostomy has left you unable to speak, so you can’t call for help or to ask for any of your basic needs to be met. Many times a day you nearly choke to death.

Finally your parents decide to take you home. They do so knowing that you may only have a short time to live, as the doctors have suggested, but they firmly believe that home, with their loving care, is a better place for you. There are too many polio patients in the hospital, too few nursing staff. They worry that you will die there and without their love to surround you, what kind of death would that be?

This is the beginning of Paul Alexander’s memoir of his extraordinary life, published in 2023. Obviously he did not die, or not for a long while. When he finally passed away in 2024, he was the person who’d spent the longest time in an iron lung in the world.

In the book, Paul states that one of the main reasons for writing it was to help the public understand the dangers of polio, which has not (as is commonly thought) been eradicated worldwide. Indeed, given the trend in the USA and other parts of the world against childhood and adult vaccinations that protect against these types of devastating illnesses, it’s easy to understand that impulse. Do we really want to see whole communities live in fear of silent killers like polio once again?

As a six year old Paul did not understand what was happening to him. He could only endure. Gradually he was able to realise that he had to make a plan for his life, to work out what he could control and what he couldn’t.

A care worker encouraged him to try to learn a breathing technique colloquially called ‘frog breathing’ that would allow him to spend time outside of the iron lung, thus enabling him to taste some aspects of a more normal life. It’s hard to do and requires a lot of instruction and practice. To encourage him, she promised that if he could sustain three minutes of frog-breathing on his own, she would give him a puppy. Eventually, he won that puppy – and it later became the evocative title of his book.

Polio robbed this little boy of early schooling, but with the support of his parents he was able to be home-schooled and graduated high school – at a time when formal home schooling and adjustments for students with special needs were pretty much unheard of. He then completed studies at university, finishing up with a law degree and utilising his education in a career in law.

None of this could have happened without the steadfast love and commitment of his remarkable parents. To bring home a child requiring 24-hour care is one thing. However Paul’s medical needs were complex and the machinery that kept him alive even more so. There was a steep learning curve for everyone involved. Paul’s father improvised a communication device using a stick which Paul manipulated in his mouth; later this morphed into a way to write his university work, and later still, he typed his manuscript on a computer with a device that had its origins in his father’s simple idea from decades before.

The book also pays tribute to the many other caregivers and friends that played vital roles in Paul’s life. There is a lost romance which is a sad tale; possibly something the author never truly recovered from.

The writing is laboured at times, sometimes repetitive, not always easy to fall into the narrative. But as a heartfelt and passionate plea for understanding of the lives of others, it’s a story worth paying attention to.

And as an example of an unquenchable human spirit, I can’t think of a better one.

Three Minutes for a Dog…My Life in an Iron Lung was published in 2023 by FriesenPress.