Hey trfogey,
I would want a EMG to see if there is any early signs of nerve damage. There is no visable weakness or atrophy anywhere that the doctor and I can notice.
Let me put the flaw in your thinking into a perspective that's easy to grasp. Your chances of getting and dying from colon cancer are somewhere around 20 times higher than your chances of getting ALS. Are you planning to demand a colonscopy from every six months just so you can catch the cancer early, even though the current guidelines call for one colonscopy every ten years
unless other tests indicate a problem?
I wanted to ask you a question so I'm glad you replied trfogey. My doctor did do some blood work to test for antibodies for ALS and they came back "negative" but is this a accurate test? and does ALS have antibodies?
I think you must have misunderstood what your doctor said. To my knowledge, there is no "antibody" test for ALS. If there was, diagnosing ALS would be a lot easier.
I guess I'm just scared as I'm watching my close friend quickly going down hill! But, he is much stronger than I. His attitude is something for the books let me tell you. Anyway maybe counseling is something I can try but to have someone sit there and ask me "How does that make you feel?" after everything I say is not the way I want to spend my afternoon if you know what I mean.
Thanks for your time
If you are that scared of having ALS, then you
need to spend several, if not many afternoons "on the couch". Seriously. Your odds of dying or being horribly mangled or crippled in a traffic accident are literally dozens of times larger than those of getting ALS, yet I imagine you'll jump in a car without a second's hesitation. Why so much concern over ALS?
oh ya something else I wanted to add my liver enzymes have been slightly elevating over the past few years. I have read people with ALS have the same problem or... does that have to do with the medication they take for ALS doing damage to their liver? I also had the elevated cratine kinase but they came back down to normal so this is the type of sh@* that kind of puts fear into me. So I hope you understand where I'm coming from. But you know better than me so any constructive critisism from you would be better than a couch visit! thanks again
Here's a bit of constructive criticism for you: stop reading about ALS diagnostic procedures and the lab values that ALS patients have on common medical laboratory tests. A huge variety of conditions can cause the same results on those lab tests and are far more common in the general public. And remember: people who have ALS also have other common conditions -- heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, arthritis, etc. -- along with their ALS and sometimes the unusual lab values are related to those conditions or to medications taken for those conditions.
In fact, it's probably wise that you stop reading about ALS altogether. You don't need to know the gory details about ALS to help your friend. All you need to understand is how to help him get things done in spite of his physical limitations. There are plenty of sites out there where you can learn about helping the motor-disabled -- spinal cord injury sites and the like -- so you can learn ways to help your friend without including ALS in the mix.
At this point, your fear of ALS has you so blinded to reality that you aren't making sense of what you are reading, so more reading about ALS will just get you more confused. So, do yourself a favor, pull your head out of your colonoscopy port and get on with your life. You're not helping your friend with this obsession.
Good luck.
