Today has been a very productive day! I announce to all my readers that I will be publishing every 2 days because I found a nice routine to write my posts, maybe later I will tell you my secret.
Well these days I've been on the Internet looking for a topic for a post, as I wanted to take a break from the topics about athletes who have had a tragic end as murderers, and I found a legend that I even had to watch a movie about him, because him story is simply inspiring.
In this post, I will talk about Lou Gehrig, mainly about the movie they did in tribute to his career and his life, in addition to the illness that ended with him because it is quite interesting.
But before starting I think we should give a brief description to the great story that is anchored to the name Lou Gehrig: He was a hitter without equal, the iron horse marked a point impossible to forget in the history of baseball besides being immortalized forever in the memory of the New York Yankees for their firmness and personality.
the film which I will leave below, it is quite old at least I can say that it was filmed before I was born, it tells the story of a little boy born in June 1903, the son of immigrant parents were more accurately Germans who would have crossed the blue puddle to the United States in search of the American dream, had the vision that it was the land where all dreams were fulfilled and anyone could achieve anything.
Lou was the name of that little boy, a little fan of baseball as well as card collectors( one of them was the great hitter Babe Ruth) and with great energy, the story is told starting with a small incident after Lou broke a glass from a store after hitting a game with his neighborhood friends, all his Friends ran leaving Lou at the mercy of the authorities and the owners of the store. Lou's mother, with a German accent, went to the store where Lou was volunteering as a part-time worker to repair and pay for the damages she had caused, including dared to tell her mother that she had to leave school to start working.
His mother was determined to pay the damage that Lou had caused, then gives a talk that we can summarize, Lou should continue studying to be someone in life, like his uncle who was an engineer, his mother He told him not to waste time with games.
So little Lou grew up under the mantle of his mother's ideas, he was already determined to enter a university to become an engineer following the dream his mother had. At the same time the name of Lou Gehrig was already heard in the small baseball communities, so when a sports critic who works for the press learned on the recommendation of Lou's brutal potential, he decided to offer him the opportunity of a lifetime.
Lou who was very angry with his companions for the jokes he received after having been flirting with a blonde haired girl, thinking that it was another joke violently rejected the offer from the critic of the newspaper. On a second occasion, although knowing that it was something true he again rejected, reiterating that his duty was to become an engineer as his mother had always wanted.
I am surprised how this movie also shows us how the dollar's purchasing power has dropped too much, the movie always dealt with the issue of money in small amounts(like $2-$30).
Following the story, Lou's mother got sick too much and given that they were a lower middle-class family and because the general hospital was full, Lou was forced to find a way to pay for his or her mother's medical expenses. she could die
Lou did not think twice, he did not want to put at risk the woman who had given him such a happy life and decided, secretly, to join the team of the New York Yankees and with his first payment to cover medical expenses.
Lou's father was distressed because Lou had taken a trip to a university where he was going to train and meet the New York Yankees, so he had to invent the source of the money that Lou was going to receive.
Quickly and characterized by a simple and friendly personality, Lou was climbing and being featured in newspapers throughout New York. It was a star that was hitting as nobody had done, some thought it would not last so long on the court saying that it was just a passing star, but Lou proved the opposite.
The first time Lou's mother found out that he was not studying to be an engineer and that he was playing baseball, she lashed out at him with many discouraging words and even told him that he was never going to see him at a game. Next, she went to the next game to see the iron horse for the first time, a nickname that Lou was earning thanks to his dedication and potential.
While this was happening, the film also shows us the birth of love between a sweet Chicago girl, daughter of a company president, and Lou who was a trend throughout the country. Between nights of appointments at fairs, evenings and even a beautiful dance scene to the rhythm of a classic waltz.
Finally, the couple gets married in their new house, which they were decorating together. That day of his wedding, he had a party he attended and that was the best honeymoon they could have prepared. Lou never missed any game, he could be sick but never renegade before that, even if he had broken fingers or the spirit on the floor never let him win for that, he had that passion that never flinched.
Lou went on to play more than 2000 consecutive games as part of the New York Yankees team, and after having formed invaluable friendships with great veterans such as Babe Ruth, who happened to have also been his childhood hero, that pair would be feared on the court. Although Lou initially lived in the shadow of Babe Ruth's exploits, his exploits eventually grew and made Babe Ruth smaller.
One day after the 2000 game, after returning from the stadium which was full of Lou's fánaticos, he returns to his wife's house with whom he has a moment of love and happiness, she tells him that none of his fans knows what that he has had to live or endure to have achieved so much in his life, ending that emotional scene Lou feels a strange pain in the articulation of his elbow and puts a face of concern.
Since that day, almost 16 years after starting his career and having had an amazing performance as a hitter, his season started very badly because everyone realized that Lou was playing terribly. Criticism and rumors spread throughout the city, but they could not with the affection and love that citizens had for Lou.
In a game, Lou realizes that he can no longer play, it is impossible for him to react or handle his hands like he did before, so he decides to go with another doctor. With multiple visits to different doctors and many tests with different diagnoses, the latter doctor discovers that Lou was presenting symptoms of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, which would prevent him from playing baseball again and having to announce his definitive withdrawal, in addition to giving him a prognosis of short life
The final scene in which they commemorate the great last speech of Lou did not make right memory to the true one, still, it was quite emotional.
The only bad comment I can say about the movie is that I think it lacked enough to make true to who was Lou Gehrig, as a film director said out there, is another Hollywood product.
Watch the movie!!!
Now I would like to talk more deeply about this rare disease and the effects it had on Lou.
I would like to study medicine as a second career, I am very interested in interesting things and because medicine is full of them.
The last 2 years of Lou's life were in decline, he ended up working in the city hall of New York but eventually, he could not use his hands to write so his wife helped him with his work. The cause of death was probably a respiratory failure, the disease will be detailed a little down here.
Lou Gehrig's disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, is a neurodegenerative disease that kills the motor neurons, which are linked to voluntary movement, something as simple as collecting something from the ground is produced thanks to them because they receive electrical signals from the brain and interpret them as actions.
It is called lateral by the place where the neurons are affected, eventually ends up damaging all the tissue of the lateral area and causes our arm and leg muscles, in addition to the rest of the body to begin to fail. The lack of actions and their eventual death causes the muscle to atrophy and losing mass, making it smaller and useless.
Those who suffer from this disease will see an advance of this, they will end up using a wheelchair and losing total mobility if it is fully developed. Things like intelligence are not affected at all, that's why geniuses like Stephen Hawking, who was a prominent scientist who crushed any medical prognosis and managed to live more than 40 years with this disease.
Lou also saw his respiratory capacity affected, they already know breathing is voluntary, although automatic depends on the motor neurons.
It is not contagious, but there is a variant that can be inherited, the average life varies between patients because there are never 2 cases, there is no explanation of why this disease appears but usually always brings depression.
In the end, Lou managed to have the record of 2,130 consecutive games played and a 16-year career as a baseball player
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