Paulo Henrique Machado has lived almost his
entire life in hospital. As a baby he suffered
infantile paralysis brought on by polio, and
he is still hooked up to an artificial respirator
24 hours a day.
But despite this, he has trained as a computer
animator and is now creating a television series
about his life.
The Brazilian's first memories are of exploring the
hospital he has lived in for 45 years by wheelchair.
"I explored up and down the corridors, going into
the rooms of other children that were here - that is
how I discovered my 'universe'," he says.
"For me, playing football or with normal toys
wasn't an option, so it was more about using my
imagination."
Machado's mother died when he was two days old,
and as a baby he contracted polio - the result of
one of the last big outbreaks of the disease in
Brazil.


Ligia Marcia Fizeto, Machado's nursing assistant,
began working in the hospital - Sao Paulo's Clinicas
- shortly after he arrived.
"It was very sad to see all those children, all lying
there immobilised in their beds, or with very little
movement," she says.
In the 1970s, children with polio were encased in a
"torpedo" - a body-encasing iron lung - and doctors
at the hospital gave grim assessments of the
children's prospects. Few in the "polio ward" were
expected to reach adolescence - their life
expectancy was just 10 years.
With very limited mobility, Machado's world
formed around the friends he made on the ward.
"There was me, Eliana, Pedrinho, Anderson,
Claudia, Luciana and Tania. They were here for a
good length of time too, more than 10 years," he
says.

With the innocence of childhood, he never
imagined that they would be parted. But by 1992,
some of the children had begun to deteriorate -
one by one, his friends began to die.
"It was difficult," says Machado. "Each loss was like
a dismembering, you know, physical… like a
mutilation," he says. "Now, there's just two of us
left - me and Eliana."