Active Hope

I’m with my family in Sweden, visiting our Swedish relatives. My mother-in- law, Ruth, shared with me a theme from a radio broadcast she recently listened to about dealing with death and difficult diagnoses. The theme was “active hope.”

I have written a series of essays for the Joe Martin ALS Foundation entitled “I have ALS. Now What?” It is meant for people newly diagnosed with ALS. When the essays are posted on the Joe Martin ALS Foundation website I’ll share the link here. For now, in keeping with the theme of “active hope,” I share one section here, on prospects for new treatments that may soon enable us to survive the disease….

Surviving ALS? The prospects for new treatments

You have been diagnosed with ALS at a singular moment in the history of the disease. In the past, a diagnosis of ALS was followed by advice to “get your things in order” because the disease is 100% fatal. Today, we are part of a unique generation of PALS who have a chance – maybe a pretty good chance, maybe only a “puncher’s chance” —  of surviving the disease. Thanks in part to the big funding push for ALS research that the 2014 Ice Bucket Challenge made possible, a number of potential therapies have now made their way through the (unavoidably slow) research pipeline to clinical trials. Medical scientists working on ALS are now voicing optimism that a therapy will be developed in the next five years that will either dramatically slow, halt, or even reverse the disease.  

To use an over-worn cliché in the ALS community, “we’re in a race against time.”

If in fact we are getting closer to discovery of a therapy that will render ALS a chronic and not fatal disease – and it is impossible to know when this will occur – those of us with ALS today are either going to be the last cohort of PALS to die of the disease, or the first to survive it. I know which one I prefer.

The closest approximation to our situation is the discovery of a cocktail of drugs in 1995 that effectively treated HIV/AIDs. HIV/AIDs patients faced 100% mortality rates up to 1995; thereafter mortality rates plummeted, and today people with HIV/AIDs are able to live with the disease as a chronic condition.

Two factors, both outside our control, will determine if we will be able to benefit from effective therapies in time. First is the length of time it will take for these therapies to be discovered and approved, and the second is the speed of progression of the disease each of us is dealing with. One of the reasons many of us have joined ALS support and advocacy groups is to lobby hard for a big push by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to increase funding for ALS research at this critical moment. Tens of thousands of lives potentially hang in the balance.

This is not meant to build up false hopes on our part, but it is to say we have a reasonable hope.  I have found it psychologically very helpful to keep telling myself that I will be part of the first generation of PALS who survive this disease.