My father has late-stage Lou Gehrig’s disease. Actually, he’s technically not my father since my stepfather legally became my father in an adult adoption a few years ago. But Stephen was my father for the first two years of my life, and I look a lot like him. One reason we moved from Connecticut to California was to be near him at the end of his life.

When he was first diagnosed with ALS about two and a half years ago, the only symptoms were some trouble walking and difficulty holding things. The doctors gave him only a few months to live before his lungs succumbed to the disease and stopped working.

In the beginning, I said, “Welcome to my world,” a lot, if only in my head, because many of his problems were similar to my Multiple Sclerosis. He stumbled; I stumbled. He dropped things; I dropped things. Etc. But since then I’ve stayed the same, probably due to the interferon medicine I’ve been taking since the onset of my MS. Meanwhile his ALS has marched inexorably on, as it always does.

Read on

This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 at 12:53 pm and is filed under Depression Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, bookmark this on del.icio.us, or trackback from your own site.