On Any Given Day
Joe Martin and Ross Yockey

John F. Blair, Publisher
978-0-89587-233-3
$21.95 hardcover
6 x 9    
181 pages; black-and-white photos throughout
Published in 2000
Bio/Memoir

On November 22, 1998, Joe Martin maneuvered his motorized chair to his desk and to the computer that let him type by bouncing an infrared beam off his eye as he looked at a keyboard on the screen. ALS—Lou Gehrig's disease—had deprived him of nearly all his muscle control. But ALS does not affect the mind, and his mind now was filled with anger and determination.

Like millions of Americans, Joe had just watched a 60 Minutes program in which Jack Kevorkian "euthanized" a man. The man had Lou Gehrig's disease and had begun to lose hope—just as Joe once had. But instead of helping the man recover from the trauma of his condition, Kevorkian had helped him abandon hope. Whatever good that man might have accomplished—whatever purpose the rest of his life might have held—was gone in the plunge of Dr. Death's syringe.

Joe Martin had already outlived one doctor's prognosis by more than two years. He was still building a career as what his boss called the "conscience" of the largest bank in the United States. Since being diagnosed with ALS, he'd helped start the Southeast's first comprehensive center for ALS research and patient care. He'd begun a movement to improve race relations in the Carolinas. Now, he was writing a book.

Joe wanted that book to tell people with serious problems not how to die but how to live. He wanted to tell them how, on any given day, people could not predict what might be possible with the help of understanding doctors, family members, and friends and the oversight of a loving God.

That night, focusing on each letter, comma, and space with his eyes, Joe composed an e-mail to his collaborator on the book. The man on television, he wrote, had died not from ALS but from hopelessness and terror. "Hopelessness and terror are both curable," the e-mail said. "Write faster!"