Intensive care, for the first time! A tracheostomy, a supra pubic catheter and infections that’s what brings me to ICU. I have ALS, Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. At this stage of the disease I’m quadriplegic, but of a different kind. I have a dysfunctional motor cortex, all other cortices are firing fine, all other sense are normal and intact! I’m confined to my Quantum I –  level motorized wheelchair. I have been for many months now. During admission the usual patient wrist band is secured neatly to my wrist. The next band makes laugh out loud, at this stage I can still laugh as I don’t have the tracheostomy yet. It’s luminous yellow with big bold black text “FALL RISK.” I wonder if it’s to protect me or the hospital! I’m sure the later. Anyhow, it’s made me laugh, unless somebody drops me, I’m not going to fall anywhere on my own accord. It’s a band they should give you when they diagnose you with ALS. In my case, I didn’t realize how frequently I would fall or how suddenly it would start! At first you stumble, your muscles don’t fire fast enough after sitting for an hour. The quads, hamstrings and glutes fall into a relaxed state, supporting the body in a seated upright posture. You stand, start to walk, and before you realize you’ve stumbled ten feet before your motor cortex decides to fire the correct message to the muscles groups that allow you to walk! It’s as though your brain was lost in conversation, and your body way ahead of the conversation decided to leave. By the time motor cortex catches up, you’ve stumbled ten feet across the office looking like your laces were tied together, before your neurons fire the correct messages to muscles – walk! By that time, you are already the office clown! Of course, no one yet knows you have ALS. And so, the stumbles lead to falls. A falling six-foot one frame is rather comical for others watching. For the person falling, time slows down, you travel through space affected only by gravity, nothing you can do can pause time, or avoid the inevitable – pain and embarrassment. A Lazy foot catches the edge of a raised paving stone on the sidewalk along the Kings Road, prostrate, for what feels like forever gravity draws you ever closer to the ground. Thankfully it’s past seven in the evening and last-minute stragglers are making their way home, not to embarrassing! The body, still able to twist avoids the face slamming into the concrete.   Another time, a box conveniently in the path of travel, catches the lazy foot, gravity takes hold, face plant squarely on the office floor. Walking stick in one direction body and glasses in another! By the time you’ve realized that you’ve hit the floor, the body is no longer able to twist, you have ten people around you trying desperately to get you upright. Falls really hurt, no control over the coordination of muscle groups means falling is inevitable.   Falling backwards is the worst, no sense of when or where you land, you fall like a steel beam, rigid! Missing a coffee table, the sharp shaft of a rowing machine, all very near misses to fatality!   When you think about life, we fall regularly.  It’s how we learn lessons in life and often, it’s painful! When we are born, we first start with millions of movements, the motor cortex holding onto those that might be useful. A hand to the face, memorized for eating or wiping away tears, the rest of the cute baby frenzied movements forgotten, no longer required. Then we start to sit up, inevitably, we fall. Start to crawl we fall. To walk, we fall, to run we fall. To ride a bike or a horse, we fall, get back up no matter how much it hurts and start again.   And so, the story continues! We should be born with this tattooed to our wrist, “FALL RISK.” It will serve as a reminder that it’s okay to fall, and that we hardly ever fall alone. There is always someone to pick us up, at work a colleague or mentor, in life a friend or an attentive parent and that’s how we learn the lesson.

There is a Zen koan, a riddle usually given to monks to consider during meditation to try to find enlightenment. “Layman Pang was once selling bamboo baskets. Coming down off a bridge, he stumbled and fell. When his daughter, Lingzhao, saw this she ran to her father’s side and threw herself down. What are you doing? Cried the Layman. I saw daddy fall to the ground, so I’m helping, replied Lingzhoa. Luckily no one was watching, remarked Layman.” I love the father’s response! There are so many ways to help those who fall! Joining them in their mishap is a good start, but perhaps not by falling in the same manner! Are they just like Layman’s daughter sympathizing with the fall but not helping at all? It’s the most difficult thing to reach down and help someone up from the fall! It’s human nature to laugh or say you’ve really screwed up and your going to be in trouble now, or you’re fired, instead of making plans to correct the failure, learn from the lesson, commit it to memory and move on again. After all, is this not what attentive parents, good friends and mentors do for us in life, yet we are so easy to forget this as we go through life! Having, “FALL RISK” tattooed to our wrist at birth will remind us of how frequently we fall in life! It hurts like hell, but we learn our lessons and get up again. “We fall down seven times, stand up eight.”

Even with ALS we can’t lay on the floor looking for pity. We dust ourselves off, take care of the wounds and find a way forward!  In work, in love and in life, we learn the lesson the same way, we fall!  It’s the only way we learn how to grow and move forward.

#challengeALSDXB