stfu, maybe if they came out with an iron coccyx then you wouldn't currently be leaking shit out of your rusty, necrotic tailbone
The long read: When he was six, Paul Alexander contracted polio and was paralysed for life. Today he is 74, and one of the last people in the world still using an iron lung. But after surviving one deadly outbreak, he did not expect to find himself threatened by another
www.theguardian.com
"Sullivan made a deal with her patient. If he could frog-breathe without the iron lung for three minutes, she’d give him a puppy. It took Paul a year to learn to do it, but he got his puppy...Once he could breathe reliably for long enough, he could get out of the lung for short periods of time, first out on the porch, and then into the yard.
Although he still needed to sleep in the iron lung every night – he couldn’t breathe when he was unconscious – Paul didn’t stop at the yard. At 21, he became the first person to graduate from a Dallas high school without physically attending a class. He got into Southern Methodist University in Dallas, after repeated rejections by the university administration, then into law school at the University of Texas at Austin. 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 is charming, friendly, talkative, quick to anger and quick to make a joke."