Little Victories - a Column by Matthew Lafleur

“You’re cured, Matt! You’re cured!” yelled some friends, their shouts echoing in the ballroom of my college’s student union almost 15 years ago. I remained sitting in my wheelchair following this Christian service of a popular healing preacher.  By then, Friedreich’s ataxia (FA) required me to…

For some reason, the huge tome of American literature that served as my textbook for high school English always opened to the poem, “For the Dead,” by Adrienne Rich. Probably because the page was dead center in that hulking paperback book, that poem…

The long drive back home was uneventful as the sky shifted from a clear blue to an ominous collection of thunderclouds. If it was a metaphor, I was too tired to notice. We drove on. I asked my buddy Ryan, who was driving my van, what his favorite part of…

“This isn’t a good start to the trip,” I thought while trying not to topple to the floor. I’d missed my wheelchair seat while trying to transfer into it. I was at the Lafayette Regional Airport in Louisiana, and the only bathroom beyond the security checkpoint wasn’t even close…

Sometimes holding on to hope looks a lot like desperation. I’ve been dealing with the unstoppable progression of my disorder, Friedreich’s ataxia (FA), for most of my life. Since there is no treatment or cure for FA yet, nothing stops it from ravaging me and sapping my abilities little…

Although I believed that the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to wane, the delta variant has caused a huge increase in cases. Social distancing and mask mandates are on the rise again, much to my disappointment. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s current health guidelines aren’t very different from…

“Are you sure you’ll be OK?” my three friends asked after they sat me on a picnic table, pen in hand and journal before me. It was 2006, and we were on spring break. The late afternoon sunlight wasn’t getting any brighter, and I knew they wouldn’t want me to…

Everyone could see me grimacing uncomfortably. “Here we go again,” I think as I feel an uneasy lump in my stomach. I find myself back in 1999 in a recurring, unpleasant dream I have every few months. In the dream, I’m at my desk near the back of a seventh-grade…

“Man, I didn’t realize how great it feels to be in the same room with friends,” I thought late one night as my friends Kayla and Mike were leaving. I hadn’t seen them in over a year due to the pandemic, and in that time, they’d gotten engaged. When they…

I’m no stranger to this question, but I wasn’t the one who posed it recently. Ever since I was diagnosed with Friedreich’s ataxia (FA) in childhood, I’ve dealt with its progressively disabling symptoms, including the transition from awkwardness to quitting sports to using a wheelchair — all during puberty.