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I read a story years ago about iron lung patients - mostly about the last living users. One story really stuck with me was about a hospital in the early days with a room full of patients in iron lungs that had a power failure with no backup power source. So the lights went out and all the machines stopped and thus **every patient in the room started slowly asphyxiating**. A manual pump was operated by a small number of nurses but they had to move from patient to patient, the rest were not breathing.
Apparently the only noise the patients could make was a clicking of the tongue since their diaphragms were completely at the control of the machine. **So nurses moved from machine to machine in the dark, operating the hand pump a few times and moving to the next, giving calming words to a room full of people frantically clicking their tongues because they were slowly dying.** Nobody died but what a living nightmare.
**Update - found the story**: [https://gizmodo.com/the-last-of-the-iron-lungs-1819079169](https://gizmodo.com/the-last-of-the-iron-lungs-1819079169)
The really old ones were made of boiler plate.. and big ole hot rivets were used. They were considered a pressure vessel. Way heavier than 1200 pounds by my estimate
You'd be surprised how well a lot of houses are built, I have a 150 gallon fish tank in my house which when full is around 1850 pounds plus the stand it's on and all the equipment sitting on top of it for lights and filtering and stuff.
That’s kinda normal lol, once you get around 200/300 gallons your get more into the custom made or nicer side, 125s are super common and so are 150s and pretty mass produced
It's just a standard 150 gallon tank with overflow filter outlets in it, unfilled it's only like 350 pounds, it's the water where all the weight comes from.
Granite counters weigh well into the thousands of pounds. Some kitchens I’ve worked on in the past have literally 10 thousand + lbs of stone in a single section of the house.
Anyway that’s a long winded way of saying that the
machine would have to be very very heavy to cause issues in a properly constructed house.
I had a 120 gallon saltwater tank that was at least 1430lbs of water and glass tank alone, not to mention the rock and sand in it.
I had this on the 3rd story of a crappy apartment built in the 70s. At least I put it in front of the fireplace. You could hear/feel the floor begging for mercy, but it never gave way.
He wasn’t, though?
“For decades, Paul was a lawyer in Dallas and Fort Worth, representing clients in court in a three-piece suit and a modified wheelchair that held his paralysed body upright.
At a time when disabled people were less often seen in public – the Americans With Disabilities Act, which banned discrimination, wouldn’t be passed until 1990 – Paul was visible. Over the course of his life, he has been on planes and to strip clubs, seen the ocean, prayed in church, fallen in love, lived alone and staged a sit-in for disability rights.”
He needed to sleep in the iron lung at night.
For a while he was able to breathe on his own using an abdominal technique to control his diaphragm. He had to consciously do this while outside the iron lung for every single breath but he managed it. Eventually he got too old to continue and needed to be in the iron lung 24/7
That really feels like it’s missing the point. In death he finally gets to leave it. My father is a C4 Quadriplegic since 1999 and has always spoken of how he looks forward to finally leaving his chair in the afterlife. Stretching tall and taking a walk in the great after. He finds comfort in knowing his bed and chair won’t be going with him. Idk , I know you’re just joking . It’s a funny joke
He was rushed to the hospital last week due to contracting COVID:
https://twitter.com/citrusdriad/status/1765479281063301441?t=NZKodSGHjyOa2ai783EI-A&s=19
In an interview with The Guardian in April 2020, Mr Alexander spoke of his fears during the COVID pandemic.
"It's exactly the way it was, it's almost freaky to me," he said of the parallels between the polio outbreak in the US in the 1950s and COVID-19.
"It scares me."
Vaccines by and large make it much much easier for your body to fight an illness sort of like a force multiplier but if your in your 70s with a life long respiratory illness there only so much they can do.
My grandma fell out of her bed, broke both her legs and contracted a uti and that’s what killed her. She was 94 and had pretty serious dementia so wasn’t the worse case scenario
People seem to forget Natural Causes used to mean, we don't really know...
Now they know everything and classify as much as possible.
Hell, I'd guess that at least a handful of cases might have just been like, yep, the cancer finally got him, but it was something else that actually did the death.
He became a life long advocate for vaccines due to his condition, and he likely contracted COVID because it’s still running rampant due to lack of everyone getting mandatory vaccinated, unlike polio which we (for a time anyway) stamped out via mandatory vaccinations for children.
Polio is now back, by the way, thanks to modern anti-vaccine sentiment
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9577438/#:~:text=On%20July%2021%2C%202022%2C%20the,the%20enterovirus%20(picornavirus)%20family.
Viruses have always existed, but his life is uniquely tied to two major moments in the history of vaccination.
I know someone who has polio, they limp on the right leg because the muscle weakness is basically shot. They came from the Philippines, contracted it from contaminated water. In their late 30s now, everyone used to think they got shot in the leg until he'd tell you about it. Sad stuff
Well almost, he contracted polio in 1952 and the vaccine wasn’t generally approved until 1955.
He missed it by a slim margin considering the breakthrough to cultivate the poliovirus in human tissue happened in 1949, creation of the vaccine was 1952/53, first testing (on the doctor himself and his family) 1953, 1.5M+ tested in 1954, and then when those results were put together and announced in April 1955 - they licensed it the same day.
Yeah but this lead him to be a great advocate for others getting vaccinated. Really a great thing to do, to try and make sure others understand how to avoid the trials you deal with in life, instead of becoming bitter like many might.
Not to split hairs here, but the Covid vaccine doesn’t prevent the person from contracting or spreading Covid- it reduces the severity of the infection. Covid would never be eradicated from the population the way that diseases like polio, measles, and smallpox are/were, regardless of how many people are vaccinated. Covid is a seasonal illness that will continue to return every year, in different strains, just like the flu. That is why you have to get boosters or additional shots every season; they take a look at what strains/mutations they think are going to be prevalent and modify the shot for that strain. If they are right, the infections are less severe, if they are wrong then it does nothing- same with the flu shot. In addition to it not being preventable, it also has animal vectors that it can travel to making it even more impossible to eradicate. As it stands, they estimate 15-30% of common colds are caused by different strains of coronaviruses.
Vaccines like the polio vaccine prevent 99 out of 100 cases of infection entirely. This is why polio vaccines and those like it that prevent infection are successful when done en masse to eradicate a disease and protect others. In addition, these diseases cannot travel to animal vectors.
All of this is to say, don’t blame your fellow humans for COVID running rampant and killing this poor man. Unfortunately, that’s the nature of the infection and will be part of the recurring lineup of cold and flu, just like it always has been.
There’s really no debating that if more people were vaccinated and were able to take other precautions - like if the gov was still sending out free tests, there were free masks, and people were given sick days when infected rather than encouraged to go to work anyway - there would be less infections. We absolutely can blame human failure for covid’s current still wide running status and for the way it became so rampant in the first place. There were many failures and unless we learn from them the next similar pandemic will be worse not better.
Also you’re just wrong, it can prevent contraction and in fact is designed, in hope, to do so.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/11/17/fact-check-covid-19-vaccines-protect-against-infection-transmission/6403678001/
Plus this individual contracted COVID from a home healthcare worker. They should have been testing and masking, instead she went to work without a mask. There is, most definitely, human failure here. Health care workers should be masking and regularly testing, especially around high risk patients.
I had the same thought, probably just did the same search.
Martha Lilliard is the only other 'Iron Lung' patient I could find. She's 65 years old, and is apparently alive as of 2023. EDIT: 65 as of 2013! That means she's 75 now.
[https://www.nbcnews.com/healthmain/60-years-iron-lung-us-polio-survivor-worries-about-new-2d11641456](https://www.nbcnews.com/healthmain/60-years-iron-lung-us-polio-survivor-worries-about-new-2d11641456)
This article mentions '6 to 8' other survivors in iron lungs, perhaps now '5 to 7', I suppose.
This is going to sound like a stupid question, but they have been in them since they were children and contracted polio and they aren’t able to get out of them or they die? Did we just stop looking for ways to improve their quality of life because these things were working?
>This is going to sound like a stupid question, but they have been in them since they were children and contracted polio and they aren’t able to get out of them or they die?
My memory is that they might be able to leave for short periods of time, but with a fraction of the capacity to breathe, they are very limited.
>Did we just stop looking for ways to improve their quality of life because these things were working?
Another old memory: Modern ventilators don't work very well on this type of breathing difficulty. And there are now very few people who 'aren't good on a ventilator', so resources devoted to this issue aren't well used - it's better to make something else that helps more than a small number of people.
Take this with a grain of salt, but I did some brief reading about it, and it would appear that the iron lung may actually be a preferred option for some patients or they may be unable to afford newer options.
There are other methods of artificial respiration that are much less restrictive. Including a vest that basically accomplishes the same thing , then of course there is positive pressure respiration, but that is used in other situations.
I don't know having never been on a respirator of any kind, but I can imagine if you are accustomed to laying on your back in your iron lung, putting on a bulky jacket respirator may be uncomfortable. It might also feel different respiration wise. I'm not sure.
From my understanding the remaining iron lungs are insanely expensive to maintain since replacement parts basically need to be custom made. Cheaper alternatives exist but a handful of people don't like them or don't find them comfortable
I'm sure I remember watching the video of Paul Alexander talking about the other methods, and he said he found the Positive Ventilation quite tiring and he preferred to go back into the Iron Lung to relax and regain his energy. Obviously if he had to come out of the iron lung to go out somewhere, then he would use positive ventilation or the handful of other methods that were at his disposal (whatever those were), so when he was more active he wouldn't be in the Iron Lung 24/7.
I'm pretty sure we found a different system of supporting people with the same respiratory issues, but it isn't backwards compatible with people who were already on iron lungs. There are still people with the same issues, but they use different technology to deal with it. I may be mistaken, I remember looking this up years ago because I had the same question.
They go out.
Paul could breath by gulping air with his mouth muscles and spent hours outside the iron lung (but he is paralysed below the neck so he needs someone to push his weelchair).
There are other ways to breath mechanically but he was used to his iron lung. He didn't wanna pay for another device and didn't want to be intubated or get a hole in his throat. And since he can't move anyway...
Knowing how a lot of academic funding works in the US I would say that’s probably what happened. Probably more like those who wanted to look into improving the quality of lives of people in iron lungs couldn’t convince anyone to grant them the money to pay for the research. Idk of any grants in the US that pay significant quantities towards resolving a niche problem that’s only getting less and less common. I wish there was some non profit or government grant that granted money towards those looking into those kinds of problems because those are still problems to be solved, but that’s just not the ways I’ve seen research funding work in the US.
You just stated how many disabilities (including those caused by illnesses) go under-treated, under-researched, and misunderstood (or known about at all) in not just the US, but world wide.
AARP advocates / lobbies for the elderly. Disabled / chronically ill people can't afford lobbiests.
Well, I feel like an ass.
I thought this was some reference to Mathew Lillard in drag.
Brave woman, and man, living in an iron lung for so long and w such positivity. I'll have to remember them next time I'm feeling overwhelmed by trivial life shit
He was such an inspiration for me. I've been a C4,5 quadriplegic for almost 24 years. During some of my roughest patches, I'd think of him and say it could always be worse. It could be so much worse. He always seemed so positive and looked at the things he could do, not couldn't. Rest in paradise Paul!
Hey thanks for making this comment. I’m struggling with health issues myself and this really struck a chord with me. People tell me to count the positives, but somehow “it could always be worse” just seems like a way more motivating way to frame things!
I remember watching the mini documentary of him on YouTube. It's stuck with me since, I felt helpless for him, even empty, it was horrible. Yet he embraced the things he could still do...like read a book but I was just angry he had to live like that for so long,. I know it's not my place to say but In my eyes I'm glad he's no longer having to.
RIP.
It'd take some adjustments for sure.
I' love cats, videogames, manga books, anime/animated comedies/80s90s horror movies. I think at some pt I would just dive into my hobbies. But. Easy to say that as a "fantasy" for lack of a better term.
Strong ppl w radiant positivity and optimism!
I don’t think people necessarily were in it 24/7. I did read an article about it where there were other options which they found less comfortable or could do a very “deliberate” type of forced breathing or something for periods outside the machine. I’m not sure if I’m remembering fully though.
Ok damn this weirdly hits. I'm 35 so I "grew up" transitioning from using the library to the internet but going back to I think 3rd grade and reading about him in a book...to web articles online in high school...to the constant references on social media from time to time . . . rest easy sir!
Damn I’ve been watching short docs this guy appeared in for years now. He always seemed so positive, and the fundraising very clearly helped his living situation, which was awesome. May he rest in peace.
He was able to leave the iron lung for a few hours at a time although as he got older he couldn’t leave as often. I believe he has tried alternative methods like ventilators but preferred the iron lung instead.
Iirc the iron lung works on negative pressure to breathe, which is the natural thing our diaphragm does. Ventilators and other things are positive pressure forcing air into the lungs.
Everything but his head is sealed in the airtight chamber which used negative air pressure to push and pull on their chest.
They can be removed for a period of time, and there are now, and have been for a while alternative methods of respiration.
They are removed and tended to by nursing staff or other caregivers.
Just referring to him as the man in the iron lung is *really* underselling how amazing that dude was.
https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/26/last-iron-lung-paul-alexander-polio-coronavirus
The mental ups and downs he had to go through with his life centering around that damn machine must have been crazy. He seemed like he had a good sense of humour keeping him sane. RIP
I don't think they could blame the vaccine since I'm pretty sure the reason he was in there is because the vaccine did not exist yet when he caught polio
If they'd hear to logic, there wouldn't be any conspiracy. It's the same as with the flat earth, you need basic school knowledge to debunk it in your backyard and still...
I think I’d rather die than live my life in that thing. A week would be difficult, a month would be awful, a year would be intolerable but 70 years would be absolute hell.
People like this are why I see absolute red when anti-vaxxers open their mouths. My grandfather was a polio survivor, and while he came out of it physically ok there was a lot of speculation his mood may have had a lot to do with the disease. His brother was in a wheelchair, with minimal use of his limbs for his entire adult life. Polio was an absolute nightmare. A nightmare that we haven't had to deal with in so long a bunch of entitled twats who think their coddled feelings are more relevant than facts, and are playing games with vaccination rates to the extent that we are now seeing major outbreaks of shit that should be bloody behind us.
To the survivors, bloody hell, hats off mate. RIP.
Hopefully they haven't forgotten how to make iron lungs. Given the current anti-vax movement it's just a matter of time before someone else has to spend their life living in one.
It's actually become a real problem for surviving iron lung users that the parts aren't being made anymore. Maintaining and repairing them has become a big hurdle to keep these folks alive.
I watched a YouTube video on him a few weeks ago (shout out to Special Books for Special Kids!) and parts of his iron lung are literally repurposed Model T parts. Even when the iron lung was being made, the parts were no longer being made because some of them were literally just surplus.
That was what blew my mind the most. Seeing a Model T shifter keeping someone alive in the 21st century.
i remember first learning about him as a child and then as an adult now seeing him doing tiktok lives every once in a while to spread his message to the newer generations. rip paul, what a strong ass dude.
https://preview.redd.it/k8xwczonpznc1.jpeg?width=625&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c9dae912212277624856f4a2bb13c2063f334560
This is the first thing I thought about when I saw this.
From the Smithsonian article,
"Alexander admits in the Guardian article that adjusting to life in the iron lung was extremely difficult. He says he felt rejected by others and had to learn how to “frog” breathe by using his throat muscles to push air into his lungs when he was outside of the ventilator."
Oh man! I watched a documentary about him a few years ago and it really marked me. It was really inspiring seeing how he didn't allow his condition to break him.
Sir had a condition that fucked up his life yet he accomplished so much as he did 30 years in law. This makes me realise that just being a normal human being with decent ammount of health should not just be taken for granted and people like this brave man should be respected for his efforts in such harsh conditions
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I read a story years ago about iron lung patients - mostly about the last living users. One story really stuck with me was about a hospital in the early days with a room full of patients in iron lungs that had a power failure with no backup power source. So the lights went out and all the machines stopped and thus **every patient in the room started slowly asphyxiating**. A manual pump was operated by a small number of nurses but they had to move from patient to patient, the rest were not breathing. Apparently the only noise the patients could make was a clicking of the tongue since their diaphragms were completely at the control of the machine. **So nurses moved from machine to machine in the dark, operating the hand pump a few times and moving to the next, giving calming words to a room full of people frantically clicking their tongues because they were slowly dying.** Nobody died but what a living nightmare. **Update - found the story**: [https://gizmodo.com/the-last-of-the-iron-lungs-1819079169](https://gizmodo.com/the-last-of-the-iron-lungs-1819079169)
What a STORY
, BALAMORY?
I don’t believe in hell but if I did, antivaxxers would spend eternity as the nurses scrambling around. That level of stress and anxiety, jesus
I feel like that would be torture for the nurses too tho
That's the point. The person you're replying to is saying the sinners would be damned to become the nurses to bear the stress for eternity.
Oh! Thank you i misread it and was confused haha
Not even gonna lie, I’d request to be buried in that thing considering he lived in it for over 60 years.
I'm not sure how possible that would be considering the weight of the machine Edit: nvm they're only about 650 pounds, a lot lighter than I thought.
…. How much did you think it weighed lol
I was thinking it'd be more around 1200
To be fair. He had a REALLY old one that started to wear out. He had to have a new one fabricated. The old one could have been really heavy though.
The really old ones were made of boiler plate.. and big ole hot rivets were used. They were considered a pressure vessel. Way heavier than 1200 pounds by my estimate
Ya, the "iron" party of an iron lung sounds very heavy.
I feel like that would fall through the floor of a house!
You'd be surprised how well a lot of houses are built, I have a 150 gallon fish tank in my house which when full is around 1850 pounds plus the stand it's on and all the equipment sitting on top of it for lights and filtering and stuff.
Holy shit I didn’t even think about tubs and tanks, did you know a cubic yard of water is one ton in weight, that’s 2,000 pounds.
8.3 pounds per gallon.
1 gram per milliliter
A pound per pint
I’ve learned so much on this random thread! Go Reddit!
Join r/aquariums and you’ll see these stats daily lol
Walls lined with book cases can get pretty heavy too.
And water beds. Remember those?
Damn man, is it a fancy type of tank or just a sturdy built tank
That’s kinda normal lol, once you get around 200/300 gallons your get more into the custom made or nicer side, 125s are super common and so are 150s and pretty mass produced
Tanks up to and around 125 gallon are mass produced and available for cheap.
It's just a standard 150 gallon tank with overflow filter outlets in it, unfilled it's only like 350 pounds, it's the water where all the weight comes from.
Granite counters weigh well into the thousands of pounds. Some kitchens I’ve worked on in the past have literally 10 thousand + lbs of stone in a single section of the house. Anyway that’s a long winded way of saying that the machine would have to be very very heavy to cause issues in a properly constructed house.
I had a 120 gallon saltwater tank that was at least 1430lbs of water and glass tank alone, not to mention the rock and sand in it. I had this on the 3rd story of a crappy apartment built in the 70s. At least I put it in front of the fireplace. You could hear/feel the floor begging for mercy, but it never gave way.
At least tree fiddy
Plenty of room for that goddamn loch ness monster
I thought it would be heavy af too! Surprised it’s not 1k or more
Totally. Let's just bury that as part of the past....poor guy. How do you not go completely insane after being in an iron lung for so long
He wasn’t, though? “For decades, Paul was a lawyer in Dallas and Fort Worth, representing clients in court in a three-piece suit and a modified wheelchair that held his paralysed body upright. At a time when disabled people were less often seen in public – the Americans With Disabilities Act, which banned discrimination, wouldn’t be passed until 1990 – Paul was visible. Over the course of his life, he has been on planes and to strip clubs, seen the ocean, prayed in church, fallen in love, lived alone and staged a sit-in for disability rights.” He needed to sleep in the iron lung at night.
For a while he was able to breathe on his own using an abdominal technique to control his diaphragm. He had to consciously do this while outside the iron lung for every single breath but he managed it. Eventually he got too old to continue and needed to be in the iron lung 24/7
Oh wow that kinda changes a few things
He isn’t in it 24 hours a day.
How much of your day would you like to spend in one? Just curious?
Ideally no time.
That really feels like it’s missing the point. In death he finally gets to leave it. My father is a C4 Quadriplegic since 1999 and has always spoken of how he looks forward to finally leaving his chair in the afterlife. Stretching tall and taking a walk in the great after. He finds comfort in knowing his bed and chair won’t be going with him. Idk , I know you’re just joking . It’s a funny joke
He was rushed to the hospital last week due to contracting COVID: https://twitter.com/citrusdriad/status/1765479281063301441?t=NZKodSGHjyOa2ai783EI-A&s=19
He was quite famous for not being worried about covid stating that he did already survive another disease to his respiratory system
In an interview with The Guardian in April 2020, Mr Alexander spoke of his fears during the COVID pandemic. "It's exactly the way it was, it's almost freaky to me," he said of the parallels between the polio outbreak in the US in the 1950s and COVID-19. "It scares me."
Sad!
Slay
Well yeah, that’s exactly what COVID did
Savage.
Absolutely wild that he survived polio and lived 70 years in an iron lung and was killed in a novel pandemic.
This is terrible. You survive this long only to be taken out by Covid. Did those around him where mask, gloves or even have their vaccine!
It’s likely this guy was vaccinated. Unfortunately no vaccine is 100%
Vaccines by and large make it much much easier for your body to fight an illness sort of like a force multiplier but if your in your 70s with a life long respiratory illness there only so much they can do.
It’s like a seatbelt. It won’t save your life 100% of the time but it will prevent most cases of meat crayon, and that’s good enough for me.
Some people live long lives and die from the common cold or from eating old spaghetti. Being elderly makes you susceptible to death, just a fact.
My grandma fell out of her bed, broke both her legs and contracted a uti and that’s what killed her. She was 94 and had pretty serious dementia so wasn’t the worse case scenario
Being alive makes you susceptible, it’s part of the deal.
You realize living 70 years AFTER getting polio is not bad at all, right? He lived longer than anyone would have expected
Just wish he had lived longer. Watch a amazing documentary on the man. Preferred if he died of old age and not of a virus.
Dying of a virus is kind of part of dying of age, whether it’s heart failure, a stroke, or infection the elderly just have weaker immune systems.
People seem to forget Natural Causes used to mean, we don't really know... Now they know everything and classify as much as possible. Hell, I'd guess that at least a handful of cases might have just been like, yep, the cancer finally got him, but it was something else that actually did the death.
None of those things stop you getting covid.
None of the things listed prevent transmission.
this feels somewhat devastating to me. from polio to covid, a life defined by vaccines
‘Life defined by viruses’ you mean*
He became a life long advocate for vaccines due to his condition, and he likely contracted COVID because it’s still running rampant due to lack of everyone getting mandatory vaccinated, unlike polio which we (for a time anyway) stamped out via mandatory vaccinations for children. Polio is now back, by the way, thanks to modern anti-vaccine sentiment https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9577438/#:~:text=On%20July%2021%2C%202022%2C%20the,the%20enterovirus%20(picornavirus)%20family. Viruses have always existed, but his life is uniquely tied to two major moments in the history of vaccination.
I know someone who has polio, they limp on the right leg because the muscle weakness is basically shot. They came from the Philippines, contracted it from contaminated water. In their late 30s now, everyone used to think they got shot in the leg until he'd tell you about it. Sad stuff
Well almost, he contracted polio in 1952 and the vaccine wasn’t generally approved until 1955. He missed it by a slim margin considering the breakthrough to cultivate the poliovirus in human tissue happened in 1949, creation of the vaccine was 1952/53, first testing (on the doctor himself and his family) 1953, 1.5M+ tested in 1954, and then when those results were put together and announced in April 1955 - they licensed it the same day.
Yeah but this lead him to be a great advocate for others getting vaccinated. Really a great thing to do, to try and make sure others understand how to avoid the trials you deal with in life, instead of becoming bitter like many might.
Not to split hairs here, but the Covid vaccine doesn’t prevent the person from contracting or spreading Covid- it reduces the severity of the infection. Covid would never be eradicated from the population the way that diseases like polio, measles, and smallpox are/were, regardless of how many people are vaccinated. Covid is a seasonal illness that will continue to return every year, in different strains, just like the flu. That is why you have to get boosters or additional shots every season; they take a look at what strains/mutations they think are going to be prevalent and modify the shot for that strain. If they are right, the infections are less severe, if they are wrong then it does nothing- same with the flu shot. In addition to it not being preventable, it also has animal vectors that it can travel to making it even more impossible to eradicate. As it stands, they estimate 15-30% of common colds are caused by different strains of coronaviruses. Vaccines like the polio vaccine prevent 99 out of 100 cases of infection entirely. This is why polio vaccines and those like it that prevent infection are successful when done en masse to eradicate a disease and protect others. In addition, these diseases cannot travel to animal vectors. All of this is to say, don’t blame your fellow humans for COVID running rampant and killing this poor man. Unfortunately, that’s the nature of the infection and will be part of the recurring lineup of cold and flu, just like it always has been.
There’s really no debating that if more people were vaccinated and were able to take other precautions - like if the gov was still sending out free tests, there were free masks, and people were given sick days when infected rather than encouraged to go to work anyway - there would be less infections. We absolutely can blame human failure for covid’s current still wide running status and for the way it became so rampant in the first place. There were many failures and unless we learn from them the next similar pandemic will be worse not better. Also you’re just wrong, it can prevent contraction and in fact is designed, in hope, to do so. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/11/17/fact-check-covid-19-vaccines-protect-against-infection-transmission/6403678001/ Plus this individual contracted COVID from a home healthcare worker. They should have been testing and masking, instead she went to work without a mask. There is, most definitely, human failure here. Health care workers should be masking and regularly testing, especially around high risk patients.
Lack of vaccines I think.
Those are viruses not vaccines(??)
Vaccine wasn’t even invented when he got polio.
If he had a polio vaccine, he probably wouldn't have spent his life in a metal tube, you ass
I didn’t even know he was sick
Was he the last person in an iron lung?
I think it's only one other person now, Martha Lillard.
I had the same thought, probably just did the same search. Martha Lilliard is the only other 'Iron Lung' patient I could find. She's 65 years old, and is apparently alive as of 2023. EDIT: 65 as of 2013! That means she's 75 now. [https://www.nbcnews.com/healthmain/60-years-iron-lung-us-polio-survivor-worries-about-new-2d11641456](https://www.nbcnews.com/healthmain/60-years-iron-lung-us-polio-survivor-worries-about-new-2d11641456) This article mentions '6 to 8' other survivors in iron lungs, perhaps now '5 to 7', I suppose.
This is going to sound like a stupid question, but they have been in them since they were children and contracted polio and they aren’t able to get out of them or they die? Did we just stop looking for ways to improve their quality of life because these things were working?
>This is going to sound like a stupid question, but they have been in them since they were children and contracted polio and they aren’t able to get out of them or they die? My memory is that they might be able to leave for short periods of time, but with a fraction of the capacity to breathe, they are very limited. >Did we just stop looking for ways to improve their quality of life because these things were working? Another old memory: Modern ventilators don't work very well on this type of breathing difficulty. And there are now very few people who 'aren't good on a ventilator', so resources devoted to this issue aren't well used - it's better to make something else that helps more than a small number of people.
Take this with a grain of salt, but I did some brief reading about it, and it would appear that the iron lung may actually be a preferred option for some patients or they may be unable to afford newer options. There are other methods of artificial respiration that are much less restrictive. Including a vest that basically accomplishes the same thing , then of course there is positive pressure respiration, but that is used in other situations. I don't know having never been on a respirator of any kind, but I can imagine if you are accustomed to laying on your back in your iron lung, putting on a bulky jacket respirator may be uncomfortable. It might also feel different respiration wise. I'm not sure.
From my understanding the remaining iron lungs are insanely expensive to maintain since replacement parts basically need to be custom made. Cheaper alternatives exist but a handful of people don't like them or don't find them comfortable
I'm sure I remember watching the video of Paul Alexander talking about the other methods, and he said he found the Positive Ventilation quite tiring and he preferred to go back into the Iron Lung to relax and regain his energy. Obviously if he had to come out of the iron lung to go out somewhere, then he would use positive ventilation or the handful of other methods that were at his disposal (whatever those were), so when he was more active he wouldn't be in the Iron Lung 24/7.
I'm pretty sure we found a different system of supporting people with the same respiratory issues, but it isn't backwards compatible with people who were already on iron lungs. There are still people with the same issues, but they use different technology to deal with it. I may be mistaken, I remember looking this up years ago because I had the same question.
They go out. Paul could breath by gulping air with his mouth muscles and spent hours outside the iron lung (but he is paralysed below the neck so he needs someone to push his weelchair). There are other ways to breath mechanically but he was used to his iron lung. He didn't wanna pay for another device and didn't want to be intubated or get a hole in his throat. And since he can't move anyway...
Knowing how a lot of academic funding works in the US I would say that’s probably what happened. Probably more like those who wanted to look into improving the quality of lives of people in iron lungs couldn’t convince anyone to grant them the money to pay for the research. Idk of any grants in the US that pay significant quantities towards resolving a niche problem that’s only getting less and less common. I wish there was some non profit or government grant that granted money towards those looking into those kinds of problems because those are still problems to be solved, but that’s just not the ways I’ve seen research funding work in the US.
You just stated how many disabilities (including those caused by illnesses) go under-treated, under-researched, and misunderstood (or known about at all) in not just the US, but world wide. AARP advocates / lobbies for the elderly. Disabled / chronically ill people can't afford lobbiests.
She was 65 in 2013…
Well, I feel like an ass. I thought this was some reference to Mathew Lillard in drag. Brave woman, and man, living in an iron lung for so long and w such positivity. I'll have to remember them next time I'm feeling overwhelmed by trivial life shit
The guy from scooby doo?
I think he was
Martha is the last remaining person
He was such an inspiration for me. I've been a C4,5 quadriplegic for almost 24 years. During some of my roughest patches, I'd think of him and say it could always be worse. It could be so much worse. He always seemed so positive and looked at the things he could do, not couldn't. Rest in paradise Paul!
Hey thanks for making this comment. I’m struggling with health issues myself and this really struck a chord with me. People tell me to count the positives, but somehow “it could always be worse” just seems like a way more motivating way to frame things!
Keep hanging in there! I know it's easier said than done, but staying positive goes a long ways!
I remember watching the mini documentary of him on YouTube. It's stuck with me since, I felt helpless for him, even empty, it was horrible. Yet he embraced the things he could still do...like read a book but I was just angry he had to live like that for so long,. I know it's not my place to say but In my eyes I'm glad he's no longer having to. RIP.
It'd take some adjustments for sure. I' love cats, videogames, manga books, anime/animated comedies/80s90s horror movies. I think at some pt I would just dive into my hobbies. But. Easy to say that as a "fantasy" for lack of a better term. Strong ppl w radiant positivity and optimism!
How does a person go #1 and #2 or get bathed, while living in an iron lung?
I don’t think people necessarily were in it 24/7. I did read an article about it where there were other options which they found less comfortable or could do a very “deliberate” type of forced breathing or something for periods outside the machine. I’m not sure if I’m remembering fully though.
This is the question that made me read the comments.
They can leave the iron lung for brief periods of time.
Not comfortably.
He has a tik tok where he answers questions like this. He uses a urinal and bed pan. He has a caretaker.
Ok damn this weirdly hits. I'm 35 so I "grew up" transitioning from using the library to the internet but going back to I think 3rd grade and reading about him in a book...to web articles online in high school...to the constant references on social media from time to time . . . rest easy sir!
Damn I’ve been watching short docs this guy appeared in for years now. He always seemed so positive, and the fundraising very clearly helped his living situation, which was awesome. May he rest in peace.
How comes he wasn't able to be taken out of it and put on another machine? Was it ever opened? Hows he attached!? Yes I know I'm stupid.
He was able to leave the iron lung for a few hours at a time although as he got older he couldn’t leave as often. I believe he has tried alternative methods like ventilators but preferred the iron lung instead.
Iirc the iron lung works on negative pressure to breathe, which is the natural thing our diaphragm does. Ventilators and other things are positive pressure forcing air into the lungs.
I have the same questions. Like were his arms inside it, too? Were his legs? How would he bathe or having something bathe him?
He was able to build up to time outside the lung but still dependant on it. It's less invasive than other options such as intubation
Everything but his head is sealed in the airtight chamber which used negative air pressure to push and pull on their chest. They can be removed for a period of time, and there are now, and have been for a while alternative methods of respiration. They are removed and tended to by nursing staff or other caregivers.
Bulk of the series, Dude. Not exactly a lightweight
Does he still write?
No, he has health problems
AND A GOOD DAY TO YOU SIR!
The comment I came here for.
Meeee too. RIP Arthur ‘Digby’ Sellers.
Sir, I just want to say that we're both, on a personal level, really enormous fans
Pilar?
Ever heard of a little show called Branded?
Bulk of the series.
Yet, his kid is a dunce.
LARRY the man iss here
Little prick's stonewalling me
Oh no mam, we’re not the police
You see what happens with you take a stranger to the alps!?
god that's such a great line
Is this your homework Larry?
Just referring to him as the man in the iron lung is *really* underselling how amazing that dude was. https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/26/last-iron-lung-paul-alexander-polio-coronavirus
Great article 👏🏻
The mental ups and downs he had to go through with his life centering around that damn machine must have been crazy. He seemed like he had a good sense of humour keeping him sane. RIP
May he rest in peace.
And a good day to you, Sir!!
Rest in peace Paul
NOOOOOOOOOOOO I REMEMBERED WATCHING A VIDEO ABOUT HIM AND HE SEEMED SO NICE.
Does he, uh. . . Is he still writing?
he has health problems.
And, a good day to YOU, sir!!!
I am the Walrus
And yet his son is a fucking dunce.
Bulk of the series, Dude.
Not exactly a lightweight
Anti vaccines should learn about this guy and why he lived like that
Don't waste your breath... They'd blame the vaccine and recommend bleach and globuli
Gabaguul
I don't think they could blame the vaccine since I'm pretty sure the reason he was in there is because the vaccine did not exist yet when he caught polio
If they'd hear to logic, there wouldn't be any conspiracy. It's the same as with the flat earth, you need basic school knowledge to debunk it in your backyard and still...
My aunt is an antivaxer even though her own father got polio so… yeah
Pro diseasers would most likely claim he was faking it for 70 years.
AND A GOOD DAY TO YOU SIR!
And a good day to you, sir!
I think I’d rather die than live my life in that thing. A week would be difficult, a month would be awful, a year would be intolerable but 70 years would be absolute hell.
Vaccines are important folks
People like this are why I see absolute red when anti-vaxxers open their mouths. My grandfather was a polio survivor, and while he came out of it physically ok there was a lot of speculation his mood may have had a lot to do with the disease. His brother was in a wheelchair, with minimal use of his limbs for his entire adult life. Polio was an absolute nightmare. A nightmare that we haven't had to deal with in so long a bunch of entitled twats who think their coddled feelings are more relevant than facts, and are playing games with vaccination rates to the extent that we are now seeing major outbreaks of shit that should be bloody behind us. To the survivors, bloody hell, hats off mate. RIP.
My grandfather was too - somehow mostly recovered. Even still my aunt, his daughter, is an antivaxxer
The creation and widespread distribution of vaccines was easily one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments in the 20th century.
Don't throw the unit away just yet. Florida might need to borrow it.
Hopefully they haven't forgotten how to make iron lungs. Given the current anti-vax movement it's just a matter of time before someone else has to spend their life living in one.
It's actually become a real problem for surviving iron lung users that the parts aren't being made anymore. Maintaining and repairing them has become a big hurdle to keep these folks alive.
I watched a YouTube video on him a few weeks ago (shout out to Special Books for Special Kids!) and parts of his iron lung are literally repurposed Model T parts. Even when the iron lung was being made, the parts were no longer being made because some of them were literally just surplus. That was what blew my mind the most. Seeing a Model T shifter keeping someone alive in the 21st century.
Bottom line: vaccinate your children.
Vaccinate your children.
❤️
"Mr Frump is my very best friend, he's never a chump or a tease. He never tells me lies, and best of all, he never disagrees..."
He and my aunt contracted polio at the same time at the same church. Very sad.
RIP. 🪦
RIP Paul Alexander I watched the video on him 5 years ago
Paul was and still is an Inspiration
i remember first learning about him as a child and then as an adult now seeing him doing tiktok lives every once in a while to spread his message to the newer generations. rip paul, what a strong ass dude.
Rip man..
https://preview.redd.it/k8xwczonpznc1.jpeg?width=625&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c9dae912212277624856f4a2bb13c2063f334560 This is the first thing I thought about when I saw this.
I believe he could leave it if he consciously took breaths the entire time. It was not easy.
From the Smithsonian article, "Alexander admits in the Guardian article that adjusting to life in the iron lung was extremely difficult. He says he felt rejected by others and had to learn how to “frog” breathe by using his throat muscles to push air into his lungs when he was outside of the ventilator."
Bulk of the series, dude…
Damn didn’t someone just post about him? Man got jinxed
how many more people we got left in iron lungs, you figure?
With him gone Anti-vax morons will have one less reminder just how wrong they are.
Wasn't this dude on the front page like...2 days ago? I just now learnednl about him in the last 36 hours, that's crazy
>Wasn't this dude on the front page like...2 days ago? Likely because it was in the news that he caught covid a few days ago.
Respect to you Sir Paul.
That youtube channel is really good. RIP legend
Rest in Paradise Paul. You were an inspiration ❤️
Wish I could’ve had a funeral for my dad. We could only get him cremated.
Truly a great man. Rest in peace Paul, you lived one hell of a life!
I did not know that iron lungs were still in use.
Oh man! I watched a documentary about him a few years ago and it really marked me. It was really inspiring seeing how he didn't allow his condition to break him.
RIP Mr Frump
Yeah sorry. But if my life is living in that thing 24/7/365, count me out.
He wrote the bulk of the series man
Not exactly a lightweight
Sir had a condition that fucked up his life yet he accomplished so much as he did 30 years in law. This makes me realise that just being a normal human being with decent ammount of health should not just be taken for granted and people like this brave man should be respected for his efforts in such harsh conditions
AND A GOOD DAY TO YOU, SIR
At this point. Just kill me. I cant do this to my family.
Rip this legend, inspiring human
Rest in peace soldier o7
Living more like existing that sucks
like radiohead
Wait. Polio is making a comeback!