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I married at age 35. The man I finally found I could spend the rest of my life with was 51 when we married. We have been happily married for 6 years and I can say they have been the happiest years of my life. We had been very happily married only a couple of years when our worst nightmare began. One night as we got ready for bed when he layed down to go to sleep, he couldn't breath. Every time he layed flat he would immediately sit straight up and say I can't breath. This was one of the scariest things I've ever been through in my life. My husband is a smoker and drinker. He loves to socialize and entertain and both of us immediately assumed that this was probably his body's way of telling him he had abused himself for too many years and was now suffering from some sort of lung disease if not cancer at the worst. After a long and sleepless night of trying to sleep sitting upright in a chair, we made and appointment to see our family doctor the next day. We thought for sure he would be able to tell us what the problem was and give him something that would help him lay down and be able to breath so he could sleep. The day after seeing our family doctor about this he was forced to take a car trip of about 600 miles for the business he owned. While out of town on this business trip he recieved what sounded like a seriously frantic call from the doctors office. The message left in his voice mail just said "the doctor needs to see you right away to discuss the results of your xrays. This of course caused us both to go into a frantic freaked out worry. After several calls to the doctors office and explaining to the nurse on the other end of the phone that he was out of town and could not return for several days he convinced the nurse to let him talk to the doctor on the phone. The doctor explained to my husband that the lower half of both of his lungs had collapsed and this was surely the reason for his not being able to breath. He didn't however have a reasonable explanation for this condition and recommended we make an appointment immediately with a respiratory specialist. This was serious! When we tried to get an appointment with a respiratory specialist we were told it would be 2 weeks. For the next two weeks my husband would have to wait until he was totally exhausted and then hope to fall asleep sitting up in a chair. The day for the respriatory exam finally arrived and the doctor examined my husband's xrays, did some poking and prodding, not very much really as far as examination goes and then gave him a test that measured his lung capacity. His diagnosis; ALS. He explained that ALS causes a failure of the body's nervous system thereby causing the brains signals to the muscles to not work. In many cases it would cause partial paralysis of certain muscles and often total paralysis. If the affected muscles were important enough this paralysis would be fatal. He recommended that my husband make an appointment with a neurologist as this was out of the area of expertise for respiratory doctors. He told us that it appeared my husband's diaphram was paralyzed from this condition. His recommendation was that we get an appointment with a neurologist and explore the different treatments for ALS. The diaphram as he explained was a muscle that essentially pushes your stomach out of the way so that when you breath in, your lungs have room to expand. His testing indicated that my husbands diaphram was completely paralyzed and he was convinced that this was due to ALS because another symptom he saw was a tremor, or shake, in my husbands hands and neck. This was another indicator that convinced him it had to be ALS. Taking the respiratory specialist's advice we made an appointment to see a neurologist as quickly as possible. It was another several weeks of course before we were able to secure an appointment with one. All the while of course, hubby was still trying to get sleep while in a sitting position. He had also found that any type of physical activity caused him a serious shortness of breath so badly that just something as simple as walking from the car into the grocery store would mean he had to sit and catch his breath before continueing. At this point, both having no reason to think otherwise, we were bracing ourselves for the worst. Then came the bombshell. We finally get the appointment with the neurologist. He does a complete examination of my husband, Questions him about the obvious tremor in his hands and his neck muscles and then does the old follow my finger, walk a straight line, stand on one foot etc. examination. After what seemed like a four hour exam, the doctor comes in and announces to us, and I quote, "If you have ALS I'm the king of England". He explained that after examining my husbands prior medical records, which included several doctor visits over the years about his shaking hands, that the tremor was a common condition called an essential benign tremor. This made sense to my husband because he said he had the shakes since he was a teen and had just learned to live with it. This of course left us with the burning question, "why can't he breath?" To determine why his diaphram was paralyzed, the only part of the respiratory specialist's diagnosis that seemed credible, he suggested my husband undergo an encephlomiogardiogram. We scheduled this test and when it was over with my husband cried like I've never seen anyone cry before. He described the test as one of the most painful things he has ever experienced. They attached a whole bunch of electrodes all over his body and subjected him to hundreds of little, yet very painful, shocks. The test was supposed to determine how well his nervous system carried signals from his brain to the muscles in his body. He described the shocks like holding onto a car's spark plug when it discharges only that these shocks were all over his body and several hundred a minute. After this test was completed, my husband remembered that several days before his conditon came up that he had fallen through a deck that was being added to a freinds house. He said that as he fell throuh the deck he reached up with both arms and grabbed the lower support beams to make sure he didn't fall on his head since the deck was about ten feet above the ground. Although he said he had some shoulder discomfort the next day from this he didn't think he had been injured in any other way. At last! the doctor explained, this is the cause of your breathing problem. The sudden jerk to his body had caused the frenic nerves that feed signals to his diaphram to be strectched and possibly pinched. He explained that the test indicated the signals to the diaphram were getting through but that they were so weak his daphram was not responding to them normally. Finally three year later my husband's frenic nerve has repaired itself. His lungs have re-inflated, he can now do pretty much everything he did before the accident. The only problem he has now is figuring out how to lose the thirty pounds he gained during that time of doing nothing but sitting around fighting to breath. So the moral here is... always get a second opinion. Probably the worst long term result of this was that my husband's business failed over the four years he couldn't work. We started a couple of web stores in hopes of replacing the lost income. We have been able to get the stores set up and online but don't yet have the expertise to figure out how to get people to find them among the millions of stores online. We are always open to suggestions, recommendations or assistance if anyone can help us figure out to make it work. True story!
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