September 1955. Six-year-old Mark O Brien moved his arms and legs for the last time. He came out of a thirty-day coma to find himself enclosed from the neck down in an iron lung, the machine in which he would live for much of the rest of his life.
How I Became a Human Being is Mark O Brien s account of his struggles to lead an independent life despite a lifelong disability. In 1955, he contracted polio and became permanently paralyzed from the neck down. O Brien describes growing up without the use of his limbs, his adolescence struggling with physical rehabilitation and suffering the...