My first experience with ALS ( amyotrophic lateral sclerosis aka Lou Gehrig's Disease) came to me about a decade ago, as I stood in my kitchen one warm spring weekday morning in Ellensburg, Washington. A woman I had become fast friends with over the last couple of years, T, called me as I was getting ready to leave for work to tell me they finally had a diagnosis for her husband and his persistent, debilitation back pain. She called it Lou Gehrig's Disease first - people recognize it when you call it that. The ONLY thing I knew about it was that it was bad. The worst, actually. I remember my brain kind of going fuzzy for a second. I felt horrible that I had to excuse myself from the phone call and leave for work. I wanted T to be able to ramble on as long as she needed to about it. To tell me everything she knew. I loved this family dearly. T and G were in their late 40s or early 50s and they had 3 boys, the youngest not quite a teenage...