Is this the day it all changes?

I've found MND to be a disease of small steps. I find myself waiting for the next stage to come, and each time I think I will deal with it differently.

Right now my father is at a point where he has no core strength in stomach. This makes very simple tasks such as standing upright very difficult. If we talk to him while he is standing, we find that we need to repeat ourselves. For a couple of weeks, before we decided to ask, we thought it was because the MND was affecting his brain, for example his memory. The family had a chat with him a couple of nights ago, and we found out that sometimes he has to concentrate so hard on controlling what muscles he has left in order to stand upright, that he doesn't hear what we say, and therefore asks us to repeat ourselves. This is therefore not a case of losing memory, but rather a case of distraction.

Today we have some tradesmen installing doors downstairs. I feel that this is the start of the disease being more visible.

We have a two storey house. We moved into our current house when I was 8 years old, and it was a single storey red brick house. Over the years, we renovated it, adding an additional level and essentially changing the entire house - cement rendering on the outside, new carpet, knocking down walls, wooden floorboards etc. When we first moved in, what is now our dining room was my parents room.

When we renovated, we knocked down the wall seperating the living room from my parents room to create a living room that flowed into the dining room.

We are now building doors to seperate those areas again, so when my father can no longer walk up and down the steps, they will have a bedroom downstairs. It's really good in that their "new" room will at least be somewhere that has been a room before, which I think will help make the whole process less alienating.

this is the first change that we have made to our house. We are still waiting on government approval for a grant to develop our bathroom - that is, make it disability-friendly. And we will need to install a handrail at the front of the house so my father can walk up the front steps more easily. And then eventually, we will need ramps, and then fancy equipment to help him out of bed/into the shower etc.

This is yet another big step for us.

The first was him telling my sister and I about the disease. Then close family. Then friends. This was a 1 year process. Then he told work about his disease, which was probably the hardest, as he more than anything wants to work for as long as possible.

The second stage was him finally giving in, and applying for a disabled parking sticker.

The third stage has commenced - the alterations to our house. Whilst they may not be too big, they certainly make his disease, and the changes we have had to make, more visible.