I live with a body that can't do all I want it do because of a medical condition, and I know the frustrations that I experience. However, that pales in comparison when I try to imagine what Jay had to cope with for the last year or so of his life. ALS destroys your body but leaves your mind intact. Depending on how lucky you are, the deterioration of your body will proceed quickly and include your vital organs so your death isn't lingering and your suffering is minimal.

Unfortunately, for a lot of people that's not the case, and they will experience muscle failure sufficient to incapacitate them to the point where they can not even sit up on their own or talk for an extended period before the release offered by death. Think about what total muscle failure entails on top of that.

It's like being returned to being a newborn with none of the benefits. You can't support your own head to even sit, let alone turn it from side to side. If you're lucky you might be able to move your eyes so you can read a book, but your hands don't work, so how are you going to turn the pages? Holding a conversation is difficult when your jaw can't open and close on it's own because the muscles don't work anymore. You'll be lucky if you don't just sit there with your mouth hanging open.

Communication is reduced to spelling out words on a tablet with a pointer held in the mouth while you can still hold things with your teeth. Then what? Losing all muscle control means losing all muscle control, and that of course includes bowel and bladder, which means you are forced to endure the indignity of wearing a diaper on top of everything else.

Its also more than likely that your lungs won't work on their own, so you will have one tube that will be constantly sucking fluid out of them, and another tube up your nose that will be continually forcing air into them. If your lungs don't work, there's a good chance your swallowing mechanism has failed and your esophagus won't carry food into your stomach anymore. That means another tube up your nose that's carrying some sort of liquid puree to give you enough of whatever to keep you alive.

Maybe I've over exaggerated the symptoms, and by the time everything fails like that, you will be dead; but if that were the case, you wouldn't have people who ask to be put out of their misery through assisted suicide. When they are so incompetent they can't put the pills in their mouth, let alone swallow them, then I would think they are dealing with substantial system failure.