‘ALS JUST SUCKS’
Five years after being diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, Mickey Beard sometimes wonders what’s taking so long. But the blues-loving, hot rod-building lacrosse coach shares his burden and embraces the people drawn to his side. BY DEVON HEINEN
T
he lights from the garage of the old blue house on Sweetbriar Street glow through the dusk descending on Peachtree City, Ga. Two cars are parked outside, a grey 1966 Ford Mustang Fastback with red racing stripes and a blue and black 1941 Willys Rat Rod. Inside the garage, Mickey Beard finishes the day’s work on his latest project, a Ford Ranchero, and begins his nightly ritual. He drives his motorized scooter over the exposed, beaten-up plywood flooring of the living room as he enters his house through the back deck. Carpet used to be here, back when Beard could walk. He makes his way into and out of the first-floor bathroom, where he recently fell, cutting his head open and hyper-extending his knee. “All I remember was my head hitting the floor,” Beard says. “I went down so fast.” Beard’s caregiver, Reilly O’Brien, a local boy who just graduated from high school, helps him into the chairlift and sends him up to the second floor, where a wheelchair awaits. O’Brien wheels Beard into the bedroom and hoists him into bed. He lifts Beard’s bony arms and sets them on his stomach, so he can put on his respirator mask. Beard, a 56-year-old girls’ lacrosse coach at McIntosh (Ga.) High, used to run up and down the practice field. Now he can’t even run a washcloth over his face without help. “ALS just sucks,” he says.
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Beard grew up about eight miles south of Atlanta in the little city of East Point. At age 25, he married the love of his life, a fair-skinned, redheaded woman named Cheryl. They met at church. The couple started a family when their first daughter, Brittany, was born. Their second daughter, Lindsey, followed four years later.
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Beard loved fishing and hunting. He skied and snowboarded. He also played in softball leagues. “I couldn’t handle working in an office all day,” he says. Beard has worked in a metal shop, as a karate instructor and most recently as a courier for FedEx. Family life always was busy. There was piano practice, gymnastics and cheerleading. In 2005, when Brittany was a junior at McIntosh, the school started a girls’ lacrosse team. She wasn’t that athletic, but she wanted to try the sport. Lindsey, a seventh-grader at the time, also wanted to play. When Lindsey’s rec coach broke his leg during a business trip in Costa Rica, he needed a volunteer to push his wheelchair around the field. Beard obliged. The next fall, the team needed a new coach. Beard was hooked.
At around the same time, Beard started having difficulty at work. He would feel a tingling sensation in his shoulders and neck when he lifted boxes over his head to load the FedEx truck he drove. Beard had been with the company for 19 years. He chalked it up to the wear and tear of the job. “You hit 40, stuff starts falling apart,” he says. But it got worse. After two years, Beard’s wife,
Cheryl, urged him to see a specialist for testing. The results showed irregular activity with Mickey’s blood. His levels of creatine phosphokinase, an enzyme that elevates when there is muscular damage, were up slightly. It wasn’t an emergency, he was told, but they needed to do more tests. “All these kind of weird, like, Frankenstein experiments,” Beard says. The tests came back normal. Beard’s doctor didn’t think anything was wrong. But Cheryl wasn’t satisfied and wanted another opinion. On Sept. 3, 2007, Labor Day, Beard was driving back to Peachtree City following another round of tests at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta when he got a phone call.
october 2014 » LACROSSE MAGAZINE 49
©MICHAEL SCHWARZ
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