My Clock Is Ticking

ALS is a sneaking disease, hiding itself amongst the normal changes of life, an imitation, in many cases, of other issues, other problems, other diseases. It's hard to tell if the changes I am going through right now are just a part of aging, or a part of ALS, or both. Both seems to be the most likely answer yet I look around at others my age and there are things going on with me that I just don't see in them.

Take the clumsiness and shaky hands for example. This is something new to me, something I had not expected. Yet when I look back at the first symptoms, back in the spring of 2011, almost three years ago, I see similar conditions in my legs. When I first began to stumble, I thought it was my bad knee. When I sat down hard, unable to control the rate of fall from standing to sitting, I thought it was because I was out of shape. When I felt so tired all the time, I told myself I needed to exercise more and lose some weight.

Yet at the same time, looking around me, I saw people equally out of shape and overweight who were not having these problems. Somehow it just didn't make it past the filter of my thinking that what I was going through was more serious, that the weakness I was experiencing was different than aging or physical conditioning. I wanted to believe that all I had to do was lose some weight and do some exercise. No doctors needed, thank you very much.

Now I look at my arms and hands, the shakiness of my extended grasp, the clumsiness, the soreness of the muscles, the exhaustion I feel when using them. I don't trust them anymore. I don't see them as reliable. It's easy to say that my arms are tired because I use them for my wheelchair all the time, yet when I see others in wheelchairs who don't have ALS, their arms gain strength from use whereas mine lose strength. I look at the clumsiness as I looked at the tripping three years ago, knowing now that it is something different, not just age or physical condition.

It would be easy to attribute all these effects to something else. It would be easy to say that it's just aging, that it happens to everyone, that I am hyper-sensitized to this set of symptoms, that aches and pains are common to all people. It would also most likely be wrong. Time will tell; it's told me a lot already. My clock is ticking.