The Speed FiendTerrorizing the Neighbourhood

As a learner-driver, Wendy is confined to two speeds in her power wheelchair, for easy reference designated "snail" and "tortoise." As the names imply, these are not the highest speeds at which the chair will move. Yet to judge from the expression on her face -- reminiscent of an E H Shepherd drawing of Toad of Toad Hall at the wheel of his racing car in The Wind in the Willows -- Wendy has challenged a chipmunk to a race to the next tree, or perhaps has just run one down and is pursuing another. Anyway, it's a picture that signifies how much she was enjoying her spin in the open air on a lovely autumn day with the colours almost at their best; today I think they were a little nearer perfection, and tomorrow they may achieve their utmost brilliance.

There's no doubt her chair has been a great morale-booster, a timely, very necessary boost because life otherwise has not been fun lately. She is increasingly troubled by excessive salivation and mucus production so her suction machine is her best friend. She is using all her high-tech equipment with increasing confidence and skill, managing the Dynavox speech synthesizer, mainly to write short notes or single words, rather than lengthy speeches. The subcutaneous line through which I can administer a surreptitious dose of Medazalam to calm her when she gets agitated is another great help. I don't over-use this, perhaps twice or three times in 24 hours.

We continue to be enormously grateful and favorably impressed by the dedication, competence, charisma, and overall pleasantness of the battalion of skilled professional workers, community-based and at the ALS Clinic. All act as if Wendy is their only patient, though we know they have many others. These include quite a lot of patients with motor neurone disease, locally known as ALS. It's a commoner disease than I'd always thought until it struck so close to home. Epidemiological evidence is rather sparse and not informative, not even a plethora of intriguing clues as there are with MS and breast cancer. So we are a long way from discovering how to prevent it. Nonetheless, some time in this blog I must say a little about its epidemiology, which has some intriguing features.