The Family Curse

Twenty-four of her relatives had this deadly disease. Dee Chiplock, the 25th, is determined to fight it.

The Breaking Point

On a sunny day last July, Dee Chiplock hoisted herself into her Honda Odyssey, equipped with hand controls instead of foot pedals. She pulled away from her Saginaw, Michigan, home and headed toward the Canadian border. On the seat next to her was a plastic bag containing a deadly dose of prescription pain medication and tranquilizers. Eight months earlier, the 40-year-old mother of two boys had been diagnosed with ALS, a degenerative nerve disease with no known cure.

Dee wept as she drove. She thought back to the day 18 years before when her husband, Jerry, proposed to her. At an elegant restaurant on the Florida coast, a waiter served Dee her dessert: a velvet ring box containing an exquisite marquise diamond. Amused diners looked on as Jerry got down on one knee, but their smiles faded when Dee started to cry. "I love you so much, but I can't say yes," she said. She was certain she would one day end up with ALS. "I don't want to put you through that."

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, which afflicts some 30,000 Americans, refers to the loss of signals that nerves normally send to muscles. A creeping paralysis gradually robs a sufferer's body of the ability to move. As paralysis limits the ability to speak, chew, swallow and ultimately breathe, the person can literally suffocate. Yet the patient's mind usually remains fully functional. Sensation, including physical pain, does not disappear. "It's like being buried alive," says Dee.

Dee was 16 when she watched the disease take her 35-year-old mother's life. Two of her mother's aunts, two of her mother's siblings, and her grandfather all died the same way. She is the 25th member of her family known to have the disease, and among them the only one still living.

When Dee drove to Canada, she could barely walk with a cane and had no business being behind the wheel of a car. The former senior account executive with a telecommunications corporation had never been a quitter. "But I had reached a breaking point," she remembers. "I didn't want my sons and husband to see what I was about to go through. It's not pretty to watch. I know. The people I loved most in the world have been taken away from me by this disease."

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