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Meet Gong Xunhui, a 62-year-old woman from Chengdu, China, who has ALS (also known as Motor Neurone Disease), which has left her virtually frozen — she can no longer move her body or speak.
However, through sheer determination and hard work, Xunhui recently finished “writing” her 150,000-word autobiography “Beautiful Frozen” with the help of a machine fitted with retinal receptors that interpret her blinking.
Xunhui had to blink more than one million times to spell out phonetic sounds to form Chinese characters. And it took her a year and a half — writing from 8am to 11pm — to finish the book. She wrote an average of 3,000 characters a day.
“I want to use my personal experience to tell other ALS patients that, although we suffer from this incurable disease, there is still much we can do to enrich our lives,” Xunhui said, according to China Daily.
Xunhui’s book covers her childhood and the struggles she has faced since receiving her ALS diagnosis. With the support of her husband, Xunhui has published nearly 5,000 copies, and their local government published 1,800. She has pledged to use the proceeds to purchase six breathing machines for fellow ALS sufferers in China.
Gong was diagnosed with ALS in 2003, and has needed the aid of a wheelchair since 2006.