P5: The Absolute Worst Thing

Left grip is 49 pounds (49, 49, 45), right grip 90 pounds (90, 90, 85) and inhale volume 4500 mL. Last night our daughter did not wake us up (hooray!), and the son did so only briefly at 5:25 a.m.

I was trying to think of a tactful way, in this family-oriented blog, to mention the encouraging email I got from a guy diagnosed with ALS, who says that the side-effects of Lexapro are entertaining.

But then ... I saw a couple of posts in the online ALS discussion group about something very important getting ... ^smaller as a result of ALS. This is exactly and precisely unwelcome news!!! I don't know if it is true, but I'm going to create a metric, a very private, confidential metric to track it. I hope that this is all just a silly little rumor.

Or that if it happens, it happens very late in the game. In the case that stood out in my mind, the caregiver wife said her husband was at the immobile, basically non-responsive stage when she noticed, because she puts a condom catheter on him to drain urine. When I used to be an attendant to the disabled when I was a student, this was one of my duties. Another person posting to the group wrote that it may be a result of the abdominal wall muscles atrophying.

Anyway, let us repeat the mantra: Late in the game, if at all. Late in the game, if at all.

Per the discussion with my neurologist, I took one full gram of penicillin last night, and another this morning. That's the plan going forward, 1 gram q12.

According to some helpful information from a reader, 40% of oral penicillin is destroyed in the stomach, and the remaining has a half-life of 36 minutes, while IV ceftriaxone has a half life of six to nine hours. In the graph, I have assumed seven hours for ceftriaxone. If the information from the reader is correct, then the dose persisting in the body is the area under the curve. This says nothing about what actually gets into the brain and spinal fluid.