remember feeling really guilty that my diagnosis was making everyone so sad. I could hardly stand the pained look on my mother’s face as she watched me, her firstborn, having to deal with such a precarious prognosis. And my poor husband . . . I felt terrible for him. He already had watched his first wife die a slow, debilitating death from Lou Gehrig’s disease when she was just twenty-three. My diagnosis was his worst nightmare revisited. Every time we got bad news and every time he had to take care of something for me, I said,
