Keeping up With Keith.
Welcome to my first Keeping up With Keith Blog.
Hi, My name is Keith Smith and I have Motor Neurone Disease (MND). Also known as ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) and Lou Gehrig’s disease, it’s a usually terminal, rapidly progressing, degenerative disease. What does that mean? Well, over 60% of people diagnosed die within 14 months. It’s a horrendous death with all the muscles wasting away and eventually the breathing muscle (diaphragm) stops working and we die. Around 85% of people die within three years and only a very small percentage live beyond 5 years.
So that is the depressing stuff dealt with, on to the reason for my blog style stories. When I was diagnosed in March 2014, I reconciled that I had crammed more into my then 51 years of life than most people could fit into two lifetimes. So if I had to die in the next few years, I have lived a full life.
Now the observant amongst you will have noticed that I am writing this in 2021 as we are coming out of the covid lock down. So evidently this awful disease hasn’t got me yet. Which brings me to why I am writing these “Blog Stories”, whenever I recount a piece of my life story, I get the same response, “you should write a book”. So, given I haven’t written before and I have nothing pre written, I figured the best approach would be to do it as a “Blog” style story, or stories.
Working on the theory that I have done so much, it would take three stories to fit it all in, I though I should divide it into “My Life Pre-Diagnosis”, “My Life Post Diagnosis” and “My Daily Musings on Life With MND”. Now I know some people will already be thinking, “what a pretentious big head”, and you are possibly correct. I would say give me the chance to enthral you with the first few chapters. If you don’t like my story, thanks for giving me the chance. If you do like my stories, that’s great, but I am still probably a bit pretentious.
So, some technicalities, as I said, I have MND, so everything I write I have to do using eye gaze technology, just as Professor Stephen Hawking did. So bearing in mind I have nothing pre written, I am going to struggle to do more than one chapter in each story a day. However I will try to make them as interesting to you as they have been for me, and the people who kept telling me to do this.
So the first chapter of the pre diagnosis is entitled Keith, Starting Work Early Is Illegal Now.
The first chapter of the post diagnosis is entitled Keith, At Least It’s Not Back Surgery.
This is the daily blog called, Keeping up With Keith, no I am not the latest Kardashian, it’s simply the name of my social media feeds.
