Thanksgiving Weekend 2007

Thanksgiving Weekend 2007

I thought on this Thanksgiving weekend I would give you all an update and then let Melanie end it with the medical stuff. I can tell this disease is a tough one. You have bad days and good days and the good ones ain’t that great!

Usually I would start with the beginning of the day but I’m going to start with how I prepare to go to bed:

First, I breathe through a nebulizer (the pulmonologist recently put me on this because I have bronchitis) for 10 minutes to get medication deep into my lungs to open my bronchial passages. Melanie crushes and inserts into my feeding tube my night time medications. I get into bed and Melanie helps me hook up to two machines, a feeding pump and a B-Pap machine. The feeding pump feeds me 750ml of nutrition throughout the night, this has really helped my stamina. The B-Pap is a machine used by people with sleep apnea. It forces air through a mask and makes the person breathe. This is very helpful because at night I don’t breathe as well as during the day mainly because my diaphragm muscles are affected by the ALS. By forcing air into my lungs, it allows me to get a very restful night sleep.

In the morning Melanie crushes my morning medications and feeds them through my stomach tube. I then put on my neck brace and left leg brace, have another bag of 250 calories fed through my tube, do another 10 minutes with the nebulizer and am ready to go to work. Work now is to read and respond to emails, look over our stock portfolio and call one of my best friends; our broker and then work on my fundraising work.

Some days, I play golf, not well, I’ve lost a lot but it gets me out of the house and with the guys. Other days I have doctor appointments. Otherwise I continue on my fundraising efforts and do another 10 minutes with the nebulizer. After that I have another bag of 250 calories and then catch up on late emails and fundraising things and relax, catch up with Melanie on her day, do another 10 minutes with the nebulizer and go to bed starting the procedure all over again for the next day.

Believe it or not even with all this, I still have positive outlook. I truly believe that my fundraising efforts are mushrooming. Please consider a donation to this grossly under funded disease and send my website to your friends, www.jimculveyhouse.com. Maybe they know someone with ALS or would like information. The more people know about this disease the sooner we can find a cure.

Keep looking at the site as we have set up a PGA pro shootout at Creekside in Salem , OR in the spring, an auction for ALS also at Creekside in the spring and a pro am and auction at Canyon Gate Country Club in Las Vegas in the spring. Stay tuned!
Click here to give to ALS research.