Today is my wife's birthday! She is 41 years old and more beautiful to me than ever before. She means everything to me and has been (and is) a rocksolid pillar of support in my life. The love and best friend of my life.
We lost a dear friend to ALS on April 30, 2010, Joe Eades. Joe had ALS for approximately 2.5 years and his progression was fairly quick in the last six months. As I visited him, I realized that the progression was quicker than he and his family could keep up with as far as making the proper adaptation arrangements for the bathroom, wheelchair and speech tools. It affected me very much so, as Joe was the first close friend that I had known to pass away from ALS. we will all miss Joe very much, but have solace in the fact that he is now free from the muscle atrophy and the deteriorating body.
Things with me have been going fairly well with a little bit more progression in shoulders and wrist muscles. I notice my speech being affected a little bit more, but only late in the day or after I have been talking for a long time. I never realized how much the tongue is used in chewing food. A little bit of atrophy can make it extremely difficult to move food around and then talking is even more difficult when the tongue is worn out. However, I am still using my speech software successfully even to write this blog post. Dragon naturally speaking version 10.1 Pro from nuance has been working excellent for me. I tried to speech recognition tool that comes default with Windows 7, but it is nowhere as accurate even after a considerable amount of time training it.I know that I should be working on my voice archiving for use with speech computer tools in the future, but as of yet, I have only recorded approximately 25 to 30 different sounds, words or phrases.
May is ALS awareness month, so get out there and do anything you can to support ALS awareness and fundraising!
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