ALS Life…

The Tongue 👅.

You can choose to hold it, most don’t to their detriment.

You can bite it, again many fail to do this with adverse effects.

It is a muscle fundamentally. It aids in speech, chewing, swallowing and digestion.

It is a voluntary muscle. What disease effects voluntary muscles? ALS!

Yes this dreadful disease takes your ability to use your tongue effectively. This effects one’s ability to do a number of things.

-Manipulate food away from the back of your throat, causing choking episodes.

-The tongue can experience fasciculations, yes! Those pesky, annoying muscle twitches. It twitches like all the time. Straight out of a sci-fi movie, it looks like it has a life of it’s own.

-Speech is affected; as your tongue slowly loses conscious control your speech becomes slurred, indistinguishable.
This is compounded by the fact that the soft palate is affected by ALS also, altering the voice.

As all the above progress our voices are lost, we lose our ability to eat, swallow and are at increased risk of choking.

Just another random thing ALS takes that most folks aren’t aware of.

The tongue; a gift, a curse, a tool or a weapon. Regardless, when it fails to function, your life changes.