Saturday, December 28, 2013

ALS

Amy's mom is a daycare nurse. She is a good person and is always becoming friends with her clients. I guess it might be hard not to when you are shaving and bathing adults.

Anyway, she arranged for us all to have dinner last night with one of her clients. He has ALS. His arms dont work. Like at all. He seems to be fortunate enough to be surrounded by a good group of family members that are his caretakers.

He is going in for brain surgery. It has a chance of killing him, and wont benefit him. They are going to implant a chip on his brain and read his brainwaves for 30 days. From this they hope to be able to have robotic arms and whatnot that can be directed by this chip implanted in the brain.

So Amy asked if he is nervous and he said that he was not planning on living past 4 years ago, so it has all been borrowed time since then. He hopes that it can help either amputees or people with diseases like MS, ALS, etc.  

I think we all see stories on TV of people who overcome giant obstacles to have a great outlook on life. It was kind of crazy to do this in real life. The dude goes into surgery next Friday and isnt totally sure that he will come out.


Below is a video of Tim. He was the first of two people to do this. The man I had dinner with will be the third, and the first with ALS to have the surgery.