The Last Adventure: Living with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS)

In The Last Adventure, the third in a series, Marcel LaPerriere continues to address the multitude of mental and physical issues that affect someone living with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). And because LaPerriere lives in a small Alaskan town, he also faces some unique medical challenges. In The Last Adventure, he tells how he has tried to deal with these challenges without negatively affecting people around him. Many of the stories relate how his life experiences formed his philosophy of life and have helped him deal with the many ways that ALS makes life difficult; stories he hopes to be sources of inspiration to anyone dealing with any medical problem. In the Construction Tips section of the book, LaPerriere shares potential workable handicap modifications based on his personal experiences living with a disability and his many years in the construction industry.A delightful coda to the book is a section of bird drawings by his wife, Connie LaPerriere. All proceeds from the book sales are donated to various ALS nonprofits.

About the Author :
Like many Alaskans, Marcel worked in a magnitude of jobs. Those jobs included machinist, powerhouse mechanic, climbing and fitness gym owner, and owner of a web hosting service and online retail store that sold Alaska-made arts and crafts, logger and sawmill operator, carpenter, and director maintenance at a small liberal arts college, and a building contractor. He even did a year-long stint as a recruiter, traveling the state of Alaska looking for candidates for placement in a maritime academy. Not one to shy away from a challenge, Marcel thrived on hard work and hard play. He was an active scuba diver, logging over a thousand dives, a climber, a caver; with his wife, Connie, helped discover, explore, and map many caves in Southeast Alaska. As ALS started to creep into Marcel's life, he elected to look at the disease as just another adventure, one that had been forced on him. He and Connie decided early on to do all they could to fight ALS, but accepted that an ALS diagnosis, at this time, is always a death sentence. They decided to make the most of each day and live life happy to accept the horrific disease that ALS is. As Marcel lost his ability to speak, he started writing. His books include Just Another Adventure: Living with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), The Adventure Continues: Living with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), and his book of true-life short stories, The Road to Adventure. He is currently working on a book about sailing and the twenty-five years he and Connie lived on sailboats. Today he, Connie, and their beagle, Bella, live in a house that Connie, their son Zach, and he built in Sitka, Alaska.