100 things, leading to a single choice

As his health fades, a doctor's acceptance of death over excessive medical intervention illuminates the difference between life and living.

By Martin Welsh
LA Times
July 26, 2009

I am a 55-year-old retired family doctor with a large, loving family and innumerable friends and former patients whom I see often. I am an extraordinarily lucky man.

For the last five years, I have also been a patient. I have ALS (or Lou Gehrig's disease), a cruel neurological illness in which a normally functioning intellect becomes trapped in an increasingly weak and eventually paralyzed body. Soon, I will die from it.

Through my career, I tried to honor my patients' end-of-life wishes. But after a quarter-century as a firsthand witness to death, I've developed my own perspective.

It's not that I'm a quitter. I have struggled against adversity of one sort or another all my life, and those challenges have helped prepare me for what I face now. I still delight in accomplishing difficult things, and I always wear a bright red ALS wristband that says "Never Give Up."

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