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Alexander self-published his memoir, Three Minutes for a Dog: My Life in an Iron Lung, in April 2020 with the assistance of friend and former nurse Norman D. Brown. [17] [18] Alexander spent more than eight years writing the book, using a plastic stick and a pen to tap out on a keyboard or by dictating the words to his friend.
An iron lung is a type of negative pressure ventilator, a mechanical respirator which encloses most of a person's body and varies the air pressure in the enclosed space to stimulate breathing. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] It assists breathing when muscle control is lost, or the work of breathing exceeds the person's ability. [ 1 ]
In 2015 his iron lung he’d lived in for most of his life started to break, but spare parts for the machine - which hadn’t been widely in circulation since the 1960s - were not readily available.
He studied, taught, and wrote textbooks and scholarly works on a variety of topics in industrial hygiene; [2] the iron lung itself was originally designed in response to an industrial hygiene problem—coal gas poisoning [2] —though it would become best known as a life-preserving treatment for polio.
The last man to live in an iron lung died in Dallas on Monday. Paul Alexander, 78, spent more than 70 years confined to an iron lung after contracting polio as a child in 1952.
Paul Alexander, the man who lived inside an iron lung for over 70 years after contracting polio, died Monday after being hospitalized for Covid last month, his friends and family said.
An Emerson iron lung. The patient lies within the chamber, which when sealed provides an oscillating atmospheric pressure. This particular machine was donated to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Museum by the family of polio patient Barton Hebert of Covington, Louisiana, who had used the device from the late 1950s until his death in 2003.
The documentary explored his spiritual struggle coping with his disability; he had to use an iron lung much of the time due to childhood polio. O'Brien died on July 4, 1999, from post-polio syndrome. [3]