Last weekend I was in Las Vegas for the National Ataxia Foundation’s Annual Membership Meeting. Like many people, I went to very little of the actual conference. For most of us, this yearly event is a chance to hang out and party with other people with ataxia- a chance that few of us get in our daily lives. I did plenty of hanging out with old and new friends, but went relatively easy on the ‘partying’ aspect this year (a fact that will have to be remedied at next year’s AMM in Seattle).

I arrived on Thursday and promptly hung out with Kyle, who is pretty much a celebrity in the ataxia world now (it took us about half an hour to walk across the hotel lobby because people kept stopping him to talk). As you can see, they even gave him a medal:

Thursday night I proceeded to get falling-down drunk off blueberry Stoli & Sprites. In case you’re wondering, for a wheelchair user, that means falling over while you’re sitting down. It kind of amazed me.

Friday I woke up early to present a breakout session on adaptive sports along with Kyle. Just prior to our first session, I spilled coffee on my crotch, prompting quite the gathering in the ladies room as people’s moms handed me cold compresses for my girl parts. It was minor, though, and our sessions went well.

Friday and Saturday nights were great, but I took it a bit easy on the drinks. The bar we all went to on Friday, though in our hotel lobby, was ridiculously far away from the bathroom (there was a closer one, but it had STAIRS down to it), much to the woe of my bladder. On Saturday I was possibly sick from too many donuts (yes, Vegas has vegan donuts; I’ll write about that in a separate post), but maybe that’s just a cop-out.

Speaking of the hotel lobby…

…it had a giant display of terrible Cosby sweaters, presumably for sale within. When were these cool? 1990? Ever?

As I was captioning photos of my trip to put on Flickr, I found myself often using the word ‘cheesy’. That’s kind of my impression of a lot of things in Vegas. I walked up and down the strip and visited various places, and the underlying theme seems to be cheesiness. Not on purpose, of course; everything is meant to be big and flashy and attractive. But I just found myself thinking that so many things were just fake, lame, trying to be impressive- in a word, cheesy. Of course, it’s still like nowhere else I’ve ever been, and I enjoyed taking it all in.

Me in front of giant fake, lit-up crystals sticking out of fake boulders. See this and more cheesiness on my Flickr.

It’s amazing to spend a weekend with people who experience the same things you do every day because of a crappy disease. It’s amazing to spend 3 days not feeling weird or out of place because you can’t walk or spill your drink or slur your words. That amazing feeling of acceptance makes it hard to come home to your daily life, where you’re probably the only one who goes through these things and no one else knows what it’s like. This hit me hard after my first NAF conference in Boston two years ago. Before that, I had never met anyone else with FA. Meeting tons of people my own age who were dealing with the same crap I was was a strange and great feeling; coming home was very hard. The third time around, it’s a little easier; keeping in touch with and, when possible, visiting other ataxians makes it feel like I’m not so alone. But nothing matches the unique feeling of being with so many other ataxians at one time.