Life Turns on a Dime...

Our Family

It is with heavy heart that I sit here and write this first post.  We have been given some very sad news.  Patrick over the course of the past few months has been suffering from some "odd" twitching in his right hand and arm.  We have spent much of the past few months in and out of doctors offices, coordinating second opinions and hoping for some other answer to what was causing the various symptoms.  However, we received the final diagnosis last week, Patrick has Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) or more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

I don't expect that you will know what ALS is... until a few months ago it was not a disease that I was familiar with either, except perhaps that "Lou Gehrig" had it.  Although, I have done quite a bit of research over the past few weeks, I don't think that I'm the best one to describe the disease or answer all your questions, so I'll leave that to the experts.  Here are some links to websites that describe the disease in detail:

ALS Association:
http://www.alsa.org/

National Institute of Health
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/amyotrophiclateralsclerosis/detail_ALS.htm

Additionally, to gain a more personal perspective there is a really wonderful book that I read years ago (ironically) by Mitch Albom, entitled "Tuesdays with Morrie."  This book is a true story about Mitch and his relationship with his previous college professor, Morrie Schwartz, who had ALS.

As you can imagine, this has changed our lives, our perspective and our priorities a great deal.  We are still very much in shock, combatting sadness, starting the process of making plans and letting family and friends know.  My experience with informing people is that it is quite overwhelming (as it has been with us), so Patrick and I decided that perhaps creating a blog to inform, educate and tell our story might make the process easier for us, our friends and family.  So, this is our family's journey...