A woman who would randomly fall over was diagnosed with a rare neurological disease aged 33 - and says her legs feel like “Jell-O” when she tries to walk.<br /><br />Brooke Eby, 34, was diagnosed with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in March 2022 after suffering from weakness in her foot for four years. <br /><br />She first noticed something wrong in 2018, aged 29, when she started taking longer than usual to get to work and her colleagues pointed out she was walking with a limp.<br /><br />Doctors couldn't determine what was wrong but Brooke's limp became more pronounced and by 2020 she was fitted with a foot brace to keep it upright. <br /><br />She started to experience unexplained falls around once or twice a month at the end of 2021 and underwent an Electromyography (EMG) in February 2022 - where needles are inserted into the muscles to measure electrical nerve signals. <br /><br />The results confirmed Brooke’s deepest fears. Doctors found signs of denervation in both of her legs, meaning the nerves that connect her brain to her muscle were dying. <br /><br />Further tests revealed the denervation had spread to her stomach and arms, and she was finally diagnosed with ALS in March 2022.<br /><br />The disease - which usually affects people between the ages of 40 and 70 - targets nerves that connect muscles to the brain, eventually causing disability.<br /><br />Over the last five years Brooke went from walking her dog and doing pilates four times a week, to having legs that "feel like Jell-O" - leaving her reliant on a wheelchair to get around. <br /><br />Brooke, a partner manager from North Bethesda, Maryland, US, said: “I just froze when the doctor read out my diagnosis. I was in disbelief. I couldn't believe this would be my life.<br /><br />“The average lifespan is two to five years. You have to believe that some miracle is going to happen, because this is the most hopeless diagnosis there is.<br /><br />“If I walk one block, it’s like I've run a marathon - my legs just feel like Jell-O."<br /><br />Brooke first started having symptoms in 2018 when her left leg started feeling weaker.<br /><br />She said: “My walk to the office began taking longer, and my colleagues noticed I had a limp.”<br /><br />She was suffering from symptoms of foot drop, which makes it difficult to control movement of the foot, causing it to “slap” against the ground. <br /><br />Brooke said: “I went to the doctors in early 2019, and they thought I might have slipped a disc.<br /><br />“They did MRIs, CAT scans and x-rays, but they couldn’t find anything.”<br /><br />Brooke started seeing a physiotherapist every week, but she said “it didn’t seem to improve”. <br /><br />Over the following year, Brooke’s condition declined further and she started to fall over a lot.<br /><br />She said: “The atrophy had travelled up my left leg to a quarter of the way up my thigh.<br /><br />“Towards the end of 2021, I started falling once or twice a month. <br /><br />"I would trip and I couldn’t really tell what was causing it. Every time it happened in public, it was very embarrassing.”<br /><br />After seeing a neurologist in February, Brooke was finally diagnosed with ALS in March 2022.
