Steve Gleason Quotes

I have been diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). It's a terminal disease with an average lifespan of two to five years post-diagnosis, and scientists don't know what causes it. ALS prevents your brain from talking to your muscles. As a result, muscles die. As a result, every 90 minutes people die. I am a person.

I have Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. It has crippled my body and speech, but not my mind.

Maybe I don't have the most common kind of motor neuron disease, which usually kills in two or three years.

The doctor who diagnosed me with ALS, or motor neuron disease, told me that it would kill me in two or three years.

Not playing guitar has been the hardest thing about having ALS.

Tell your readers to use it or lose it. If you don't use your muscles, they get weak. If you don't use your mind it begins to fail.

When folks git ole en strucken wid de palsy, dey mus' speck ter be laff'd at.

Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.

I had polio when I was 13. I started feeling stiff, my joints ached, and over a two-week period I lost my coordination and 20 pounds.

I regarded finding I had a form of Alzheimer's as an insult and decided to do my best to marshal any kind of forces I could against this wretched disease. I have posterior cortical atrophy or PCA. They say, rather ingenuously, that if you have Alzheimer's it's the best form of Alzheimer's to have.

I used to be able to think. My brain's circuits were all connected, and I had spark, a quickness of mind that let me function well in the world.

In our story logic which we're making up, if we're saying he's alive, then like a quadriplegic who's in bed he can move his head and shoulders, but he can't move his arms. If he could just turn on that power to his legs and arms, the nerves could get through and he could walk.

President Reagan doesn't retain very much of what comes his way on a given day.

I was born with Spina bifida. That's where you have a hole in your spine, and your nerve endings come out.

I had two experiences with very close friends of mine who experienced aphasia, the loss of language. It shocked me.

The thing about motor neuron disease, once a muscle stops working, it doesn't start again.

The problem with motor neurone disease is they don't know when it starts. People go into hospital having fallen but get wrapped up and sent away, unless they're seen by an incredibly astute doctor. It is only when several things begin to go wrong that it'll be diagnosed.

I think Alzheimer's is an important cause.

I had to teach myself how to walk again. It was crazy. I couldn't even make a muscle in my leg. I felt like no muscles in my leg. I was already skinny. It was like my leg was dead.

When I was born, I had a birth injury in my second and third vertebrae. It gave me what they called spastic paralysis, which is actually cerebral palsy.

You know that feeling when your leg falls asleep and you can't really feel it or move it? Well, that's what my legs feel like all the time, so being fluid and graceful has been difficult.

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.

My memory about names and places now is dreadful. But lines, I can remember.

My arm is paralyzed; my voice that once could be heard all along the line, is gone; I can scarcely speak above a whisper; my hearing is very much impaired, and sometimes I feel as if I wished the end would come; but I have some misrepresentations of my battles that I wish to correct, so as to have my record correct before I die.

The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other in opposite directions.