Dying Outside Blog

The news I got when I opened my email this morning was not good. A friend of mine has just been diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or ALS, sometimes called Lou Gehrig's disease. This is not the kind of news any of us want to hear.

Upset, I decided to search Google for thoughts on what to say to someone who is facing this type of challenge. My search took me to a blog that truly made me stop in my tracks.

The blogger, a Hal Finney recently received news that he has been inflicted with ALS. You have to dig deep into the blog to see what happens as friends get the news and share their thoughts, and Hal responds. I count over sixty posts in just a few days. It is worth having a look: Hal's Blog.

Here's a clip from one of Hal's posts: Everybody with ALS talks about how terrible it is (ALS), all the things you can't do any more. But nobody seems to notice that there are all these things you get to do that you've never done before. I've never used a power wheelchair. I've never controlled a computer with my eyes. I've never had a voice synthesizer trained to mimic my natural voice. If I told people on the ALS forums that I was looking forward to some of this, they'd think I was crazy.