About Martha's Marauders Martha's Marauders is the name of our Walk To D'Feet ALS team and the name of this website. Both are in memory of my mother, Martha Lindsay, and both are dedicated to eradicating the scourge of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. ALS, otherwise known as Lou Gehrig's Disease, is often called The Monster. It's a yet-to-be-cured disease that kills off motor neurons, which are used by the brain to communicate with the body. As that communication dies, the muscles atrophy until they are useless. You gradually (in a matter of years for some, in a matter of months for others) lose the ability to use your arms, legs, neck, vocal cords, lungs and any other body part that needs muscles to move. In some cases ALS's effects start in the legs, others lose their voice and ability to swallow first and progress from there. In the case of my mother, she started feeling wobbly. She lost use of her legs and back first, then her arms, then her voice started to go. During that process her lungs lost the ability to fully fill up. The doctor described it well: if your lungs are milk jugs, one breath generally fills the jugs up or comes close. One breath from mom filled the top of the neck. Eventually mom couldn't sit up without gasping for air and in April of 2009 she went into hospice. All the doctors could do was keep her comfortable and eventually she went into a coma and died on Mother's Day. An unfortunate thing about doctors is that some will list the cause of death for an ALS patient as respiratory failure, not as ALS, causing the numbers of ALS deaths to be low. Our hospice was happy to do as I asked and listed mom's cause of death as ALS. She counted. And she would have wanted that. She also wanted ALS to be brought to an end. So we'll keep going until her dream comes true. We're Martha's Marauders! |