Be About Something Bigger Than Yourself: ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

I was challenged and I accepted. The first thing I did was go the ALS website to figure out what the #icebucketchallenge was all about and why I should participate. Of course this wasn't the first time I've heard of ALS or commonly known as Lou Gehrig's Disease, but I didn't really know a lot about the ALS.

From the website I learned this...

ALS was first found in 1869 by French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, but it wasn’t until 1939 that Lou Gehrig brought national and international attention to the disease. Ending the career of one of the most beloved baseball players of all time, the disease is still most closely associated with his name. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. Motor neurons reach from the brain to the spinal cord and from the spinal cord to the muscles throughout the body. The progressive degeneration of the motor neurons in ALS eventually leads to their death. When the motor neurons  die, the ability of the brain to initiate and control muscle movement is lost. With voluntary muscle action progressively affected, patients in the later stages of the disease may become totally paralyzed.


Some other facts:

• Approximately 5,600 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with ALS each year. The incidence of ALS is two per 100,000 people, and it is estimated that as many as 30,000 Americans may have the disease at any given time.

• Although the life expectancy of an ALS patient averages about two to five years from the time of diagnosis, this disease is variable and many people live with quality for five years and more.  More than half of all patients live more than three years after diagnosis.

• About twenty percent of people with ALS live five years or more and up to ten percent will survive more than ten years and five percent will live 20 years. There are people in whom ALS has stopped progressing and a small number of people in whom the symptoms of ALS reversed.

So, I finally decided that yes I would do the challenge. I was hesitant because I'm not so sure about following the social media crowd. But, I made a personal decision that when I went on the website to give I was not just following a trend, I was being about something bigger than myself...did you read my last post? If you didn't you should because that was the main point BE ABOUT SOMETHING BIGGER THAN YOURSELF!

I've challenged some of my besties...my hubby, Alex and Kristal :-) Mike has it easy, I've already donated for the both of us!