midnightinchicago
Sometimes it’s difficult to explain to someone just what Myasthenia Gravis is and how it affects individuals afflicted with the disease. Sometimes the explanation is as simple as adding two prime numbers together.
Shortly before Lewis went in for major surgery, a local newspaper reporter asked Lewis to describe Myasthenia Gravis to her. His explanation was difficult to understand because MG severely hampered his ability to speak clearly but that doesn’t mean that the explanation wasn’t absolutely bang on in its description.
Just a few days ago, as I was sitting with Lewis in the front room one afternoon, I asked him to explain MG to me using the same analogy he had used in the interview. He smiled and gladly obliged.
“You see,” he began quietly and with absolute deliberation, “your body is a computer. And your muscles are like the most awesome program you could ever install on that computer.” He waited to see if I was following along with his technology laden explanation.
“Your thymus gland is like the most powerful anti-virus protection you could put on your computer and, of course, MG is like a major trojan that somehow got onto your system for some weird reason,” he added with a grin.
“Now MG disables your anti-virus program so it can’t recognize and destroy invading bacteria or virus or abnormal cell growth or foreign tissue which means,” he pointed out in his impromptu lecture, “that all your programs are at risk including that most awesome program that’s in charge of muscle movement.” He paused for a moment before continuing.
“Do you remember a year ago when I told you that I believed that MG was like a Trojan?” he asked out of the blue.
“Yes, I do, Lewis,” I answered him, wondering where he was going with this question.
“Well,” he said, “I still think that if there was some way medical researchers could quarantine the MG Trojan and change its extension from being an executable to being a bitmap, it would still be inside my body but it wouldn’t be able to do anything to destroy my anti-virus or pre-loaded God-given programs.”
I laughed a hearty laugh. Only Lewis could make MG absolutely understandable by using technological jargon to explain it all to someone like his mother who has minimal computer programming skills.
So if any of you following this blog are MG medical researchers or you know any MG medical researchers, please ask them to contact Lewis so he can share his insights into Myasthenia Gravis. I’m sure that amongst them all, working together as a team, a cure might one day be found in the very near future.
