8/21/2014

If you have any presence on social media you’ve seen the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge videos everyone, and I mean everyone, has been doing.  I did one too.  It can be seen here.  A lot of people have a story about ALS and that’s been their motivation for accepting the challenge here’s mine:

In the fall of 1999 I got really sick.  I laid on the couch in my rental house for around 6 weeks with excruciating pain in my joints.  (Full disclosure if I hadn’t been so stubborn it probably would have only taken two weeks to figure out what was wrong with me.)  I went to my general practitioner, an orthopedic clinic, and a couple of others.  Everyone had an opinion as to what was wrong and they all did a bunch of testing.  The orthopedic doc mentioned ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease, which caused me to think of the classic Kramer line from Seinfeld about Lou Gehrig dying from Lou Gehrig’s Disease, Didn’t he see it coming was the punchline and I at least got a laugh.  When I got home from the doctor I lumbered to by bedroom which housed a desktop computer with a 256 MB processor and a 56K dial up connection to research ALS.  Needless to say it was a few restless nights for me after that.  Luckily the tests were negative and I ended up being diagnosed with Reiter's Syndrome, which is caused by some random allele on a single gene that causes the auto-immune system to attack its self, or as Lewis Grizzard once put it apparently upon my conception my daddy didn’t have a good foothold. 

So enjoy watching your friends get doused with water.  Heck dunk yourself if you want, and if you can or want to donate a little money to the cause, too.