Page 104 of Life’s Too Short

I darted over to him. “Adrian!”

He was doubled over with his hands on his knees, gasping for air.

“You’re having a panic attack. Sit down. Sit.” My heart was thrumming in my ears.

It took me a moment to get him moving, but I finally led him to the edge of the bed.

I crouched in front of him. “Slow down your breathing. You’re hyperventilating. Breathe through your nose. In through your nose, out through pursed lips.”

He took a few labored breaths.

“You need to go to the doctor,” he rasped.

“What?”

“Go to the doctor. I’ll go with you. We need to know if that’s what this is.”

“I…Adrian, you don’t just walk into a doctor’s office and come out with an ALS diagnosis. There’s no test for it.”

He looked me in the eye, breathing shakily through his nose. “There has to be a test for it. People get diagnosed with it.”

“It’s diagnosed by excluding other diseases and monitoring your deterioration. It’s months and months of testing to rule out other things. It can take a year to get a diagnosis—”

“Then go do that.”

I scoffed. “No.”

He stared at me.

“No. I won’t. HIV, human T-cell leukemia, polio, West Nile virus, multiple sclerosis, multifocal motor neuropathy, Kennedy’s disease—they all mimic ALS. I’ll be tested for all of it, poked and prodded in the hospital for months and for what? I either have it or I don’t. And if I do, it’s fatal. There’s nothing they can do about it.”

He blinked at me. “But…but what if that’s not what it is? What if it is something else?”

I shrugged. “Then it won’t progress, and it won’t be a problem. If it’s still around in six months, but nothing else has changed, I’ll have my hand looked at again. But the most likely contender was carpal tunnel, and they’ve already ruled that out.”

He stared at me like I’d gone mad. “How can you live like this?” he said incredulously.

I shook my head. “What choice do I have, Adrian? What choice do I have but to live like this? I’ve always lived like this.”

His breathing was ragged. He looked like he was going to be sick. I felt like I was going to be sick too.

I sat next to him. “Look, let’s just calm down. Okay?” I rubbed his back. “We can talk about this when you’re calmer.”

“No. We talk about it now.” He was so out of breath it took him a minute to say the next thing. “If you don’t have a diagnosis, how can they get you on the right medications?”

I felt my heart shattering.

He knew nothing. None of it. None of the things that I thought he did.

How had this happened? How did something so big slip through the cracks?

“Adrian,” I said gently. “I won’t be taking any medications.”

He froze to stare at me. “What?” he breathed. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not seeking treatment.”

“What do you—you need medications, there’s clinical trials—”