Name: This Man Spent 71 Years in this Iron Lung
Uploaded: 2026-01-27T17:14:09.000Z
Duration: 10 min 6 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This guy has lived in this metal box for 71 years.

He cannot move, so he eats like this, he reads like this, he types like this.

And this machine is the only thing keeping him alive.

When Paul was just six years old, he was running outside playing with his friends, just like a normal kid.

Mom turned around and looked at me and she said, please God, not my son.

Soon he was in the hospital with other kids who all got the same disease, polio.

There were many years of struggle and there were lots of children.

Polio mostly affects children and it can paralyze the entire body.

I couldn't sit up in the bed the next day.

I couldn't move my hands and all fingers.

By the end of the week, I had trouble breathing.

And doctors had no choice but to put him inside this machine.

Within days, Paul went from being a kid running outside to a kid locked up in this iron lung.

It wasn't that I was locked up, it was to keep me alive.

Nobody thought he would be able to breathe without it until this happened.

My caretaker told me that you can fucking breathe for three minutes.

So he tried every day his mom turned off the lung and he tried learning how to breathe again.

He did this for weeks and weeks and weeks until finally he could do it.

I remember that day, the day I could breathe for three minutes and I caught that puppy.

After that, he taught himself how to breathe without the iron lung for many hours.

I could breathe for many hours without the iron lung.

You can see the machine have stopped working for him.

You can see how he gaps in frog religious teaching.

They gulp of air and swallowing that air down into your lungs.

Learning how to breathe opened up the world to him.

He left his lungs, sat in a wheelchair and saw the world.

When I finally learned to breathe out of the lung on my Own I was unstoppable.

I went on many airplanes, I stayed in hotels, I even traveled to Mexico.

When I went to Mexico, I had my iron lung delivered there.

He would stay spend the whole day without his lung and at night he would go back into it.

He went to two universities and got two degrees.

He lived with his lung in a dorm room and went to class in a wheelchair.

That lived grinning fraternity that they took care of me.

He even became became a lawyer and went to court to fight cases.

God would fight cases for people in court all day long.

Paul has been facing challenges every day ever since he got polio.

Every day he wakes up and faces the day with a small smile on his face.

I get up, can brush my teeth, some change, can I go on with my day?

He even wrote a book about his life with just a stick in his mouth like this.

It took me five years to write it letter by letter.

Well, this machine is literally a giant lung.

See, we all use muscles to help us breathe.

So when Paul got polio, his muscles stopped working and he could not breathe on his own anymore.

So this machine works like muscles for Paul's lungs.

Let me show you how air is pumped like this.

When the air goes in, his lungs are forced to fill up.

When the air goes out, his lungs are forced to empty.

This is what pushes the air in and it raises the ribs up and down.

Paul wears this collar around his neck to keep the air in sight.

There's a mirror for him to see what's around him.

These little ports are for nurses to put their hands in to help him if the power goes out.

If the electricity goes out, I can and do use battery power.

Paul is one of the last people on the planet who still use this lung.

But why does he need this 50 year old machine in the 21st century?

Turns out it's because he needs to keep his mouth free to do everyday tasks.

I can keep my mouth free, which is what I use to write to Drunk phone.

Paul's entire life changed when he was six years old because of one disease and the sad part is the polio vaccine was invented after he caught the disease.

Polio vaccine was not developed until after I got polio.

You might think that polio is just a thing of the past, as old as this machine, but