With a simple blink, Chris Pendergast wrote one letter. Then the next, and the next — continuing on this way for hundreds of thousands of characters selected on a 15-inch computer screen.
And he used only his eyes.
The ensuing words unfold across the 314 pages of his recently published memoir, “Blink Spoken Here: Tales From A Journey To Within,” written with the help of his wife, Christine, almost 28 years after he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease, a devastating neuromuscular disease with no cure.
His prognosis was that he only had 36 months to live.
“I refused to simply wait to die,” he wrote in an email, using his eye-controlled computer from his home in Miller Place. “With Gehrig’s grit, I chose to live with ALS, not die from it. I wrote stories as our family made the journey. It evolved into the book.”
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