"The Vest"

In my last post I mentioned that when we were on our epic journey from Arizona to Maine, one of the things we brought with us was "The Vest." "The Vest" is an airway clearing system that uses HFCWO (High Frequency Chest Wall Oscillation), AKA pounding your chest Chuck Norris style. "The Vest" is a mechanism that looks a lot like a bullet-proof vest with an air tube attached to the front, and when someone is wearing it, it pumps mini-bursts of air into and out of the vest to create mini-coughs. It is ugly and medieval, but scientist somewhere have coupled with respiratory therapists to try to help people to breathe more easily. One of my mom's many specialists thought that "The Vest" would help her. I think in the end, I would recommend that a person with ALS avoid using this product, not because I think it doesn't work, but because there are already so many machines and tubes involved with ALS that you could avoid one extra by not bothering with this one. I think over the course of my mom's illness most of the members of my family took their turn with "The Vest" and we all thought it was completely insane that my poor ill mother had to wear this thing for an hour every day. The period from October of 2004 through December of 2005 was a time where we were all coming to terms with my mom's illness and moving from a period where we were trying to keep her alive as long as possible to a period where we had accepted reality and were simply trying to make her as comfortable as possible. "The Vest" was just one tiny part of the period when we were trying to extend her life and hope for a miracle and/or a cure. It's funny now as I look back at how ridiculous that contraption was and the hope that it represented for our desperate family.