The Walking Dead

One of the ultimate ironies in my life is that I watch The Walking Dead. It's a show where even dead people can get up and walk. I can't, and I'm not dead yet. I realize it is a fantasy show based on a comic book. I know that once I am dead I will stay that way. Yet I wonder, in the mythology of the show, what would happen to me if I died with the zombie virus? Would I reanimate, able to walk once again?

Speaking of mythology, Christmas is coming soon. All I want for Christmas is to be able to walk once again. I want to be able to sit down and stand up from my own toilet. I want to be able to move from one room to another without using slings and wheelchairs and lifts. I want to go outside, standing upright, and feel tall once again, be vertical instead of sitting.

I doubt that this can happen by Christmas. It would take a true, inexplicable miracle. This may be the season when Christians believe in miraculous gifts, but I am fairly certain the ability to walk once again will never come to me, at least not this year. The problem is I don't have many years left, perhaps one at best.

This is the sense I get from my arms. They are failing fast, like my legs did once the process of atrophy truly got underway. My left arm is substantially weakened; I am having ever more trouble with it. My right side will follow, slowly, but soon enough. This will be the last Christmas where I will be able to drive, the last Christmas where I will be able to transfer at all, and quite possibly the last Christmas where I will be able to feed myself a Christmas dinner.

I need a miracle. Even zombies get to feed themselves, albeit in a raging, uncontrollable thirst for living flesh. I'm not so much into that. All I want for Christmas is a treatment, maybe even a cure, for ALS.