Slashdot Mirror
ALS Sufferer Used Legs To Contribute Last Patch
krkhan writes "This is a little old, but seeing as it didn't make it onto Slashdot at the time, I think it deserves a headline now. Adrian Hands was suffering from ALS and had lost motor skills when he used his legs to type in Morse code and fix a 9-year-old bug in Gnome. The patch was submitted three days before he passed away."
It's quite remarkable what people in this condition can accomplish.
Some years back I used to carpool with my father, a doctor. This meant each day I would go to the hospital after work and wait for him to finish making his rounds. But sometimes he would take me on his rounds if there was something he wanted me to see or someone he wanted me to meet.
One of the people I met this way was a man suffering from ALS. The only things he could move were his eyes and one toe. A sensor was fitted to that toe and hooked up to a microcomputer (a SWITZ system, I think - this was in the early 80s). Despite the crudeness of this setup, he was able to write scholarly papers and even a textbook in his field (geology).
Whenever I'm personally inconvenienced by some health issue or other, I often recall that meeting. And then I stop complaining abount my own lot in life.