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I Remember Running: The Year I Got Everything I Ever Wanted-and ALS By Darcy Wakefield Marlowe and Company, 2005 177 pages, cloth, $21.00
Darcy Wakefield was a 33-year-old English instructor at Southern Maine Community College in the fall of 2003 when she was diagnosed with ALS. She had graduated from Smith College, received an MA from SUNY Buffalo and an MFA from Emerson College, and returned to her home state of Maine to teach. The book chronicles her experience from the time of her diagnosis in October 2003 to the birth of her son Sam in September 2004.
In the introduction to her memoir,Wakefield writes:
On October 14, 2003, at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Brookline, Massachusetts, I was clinically diagnosed with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Until the previous May, if asked to describe myself, I would have said that I was a single, thirty-three, athletic, active, workaholic English professor, a vegetarian who'd never had a serious health problem or injury in her life. I would have said that lately I'd been having a hard time running, but that it was probably some sort of muscle problem, nothing serious. Back then, I didn't even know what ALS was.
Wakefield would soon come to understand that ALS is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that attacks motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord, has no identifiable cause, no cure, and generally a terminal diagnosis of between two to five years. The afflicted motor neurons control the movement of voluntary muscles. As the disease progresses, those muscles begin to atrophy, causing increased weakness, twitching and cramping, loss of motor control and impaired use of the extremities, weakness and fatigue, tripping and falling, dropping things, slurred or thick speech, and difficulty breathing or...