The Marion Star/James Miller Brian Vail uses his chin to manipulate a joy-stick connected to a DynaVox text generator. Vail has lived 10 years with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and uses the DynaVox to communicate with voice, e-mail and fax. The Marion Star/James Miller Ben Vail shares a moment with father Brian Vail during a visit to Bennington Glen nursing home in southern Morrow County.

What does a 43-year-old father do when he is told he has just three to five years to live?

For Brian Vail of Mount Gilead, the answer has been to live for 10 years with the debilitating Lou Gehrig's Disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, well beyond the "norm" for his affliction.

ALS has gradually robbed Vail, a 1974 Otterbein graduate, of many activities we take for granted. He is paralyzed from the neck down and has been on a Ventilator living at Bennington Glen, a nursing care center in southern Morrow County, for five years.

But Father's Day for Vail will be spent with his family. It is a Sunday and Sundays are the day he is able to get away from the center and come home to visit his family in Mount Gilead.

"'You have three to five years' that is what the doctor told me in November of 1995," said Vail as he recalled the physician's harsh diagnosis for his symptoms, which started with some muscular pain and weakness.

Family, friends and staff at Bennington Glen believe that much of the reason Vail has defied the odds and continued to live with the incapacitating conditions of ALS has to do with his optimism and positive outlook on life.

"Dad could dwell on his problems, but instead he always asks, 'How can we do that?' or 'How can we deal with this problem?' He is very positive," said his daughter, Cherry, a sophomore communications major at The Ohio State University in Columbus.

Chats with Dad

Cherry says she calls her dad almost daily to ask his help on problems, to tell him about her day, or to catch up on something they've been talking about. Lately he's been asking her if she's got a job.

"He'll say, 'Have you checked this out, or have you checked that job out?' He's a very involved parent," Cherry said.

"Technology has been a huge help to our family. Without the DynaVox we couldn't communicate nearly as much. We could talk to him, but the DynaVox allows him to talk to us through voice, e-mail and fax," Cherry explained.

The DynaVox is a device that has an electronic letter board mounted on Vail's wheel chair that scans the alphabet. Vail selects letters by moving his chin against a switch to spell out words and make sentences. He can then make it say what he has written with an automated voice.

Time slows a little as you enter Vail's room at Bennington Glen and Vail invites you to sit down so he can take a few minutes to write a sentence into the DynaVox and have it "speak" the sentence for him. He writes at the rate of about six words a minute.

Vail's eye movements speed communication up as eyebrows up signal "yes" and a side-to-side movement with his eyes means "no." A wink can mean a smile, a laugh or an "I gotcha."

Vail says the most difficult thing about living with ALS is being apart from his family and, "not being able to hug my wife and kids is very difficult to accept."

"We've all been affected by the situation we are in," said Vail's son Ben, who will attend The Ohio State University in Columbus as a freshman with a full scholarship this fall.

"It is like the whole family has the illness. Every day we are affected by the situation we are in, but we don't dwell on it and we move on and it isn't so bad," Ben added.