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Transfatty Lives

Transfatty Lives is a documentary on Netflix made by DJ Transfatty, aka Patrick O'Brien, about his journey with ALS. O'Brien was diagnosed with ALS in 2005 at the age of 31 and decided to make an artistic documentary about his journey. The documentary starts with O'Brien's diagnosis, shows him starting a relationship and having a son, becoming depressed, moving into a nursing home, and moving into an ALS skilled facility. O'Brien opted to have a feeding tube placed and be put on a ventilator. He told the doctor placing the feeding tube that he wanted to be "an electric vegetable", meaning he wanted to live as long as possible. The documentary ends with O'Brien's family and friends saying that the reason O'Brien has lived so long is because he still has a goal to reach, a mission to accomplish. O'Brien has been battling ALS for 12 years. This is an extremely long time to be living with ALS, considering the average lifespan after diagnosis is 2-5 years. I chose to do a neuro note on this documentary because it popped up as a recommended documentary on my Netflix list and I wanted to know more about ALS after learning about it in my Neurological Aspects class. While learning about the facts of ALS in class is informative and important to the learning process, putting a face and a story with a diagnosis is what makes the facts "stick". This documentary really showed that O'Brien has a very strong will/desire to live and how strong of an impact it had on his life. Transfatty Lives is an interesting, artistic, somewhat crude, way to bring awareness to ALS. This documentary reaffirmed that life is short. As I was watching, I kept putting myself in O'Brien's shoes. What if I was diagnosed with ALS at 31? What would I have accomplished at that point? What would I still want to do? How would it impact my family? What measures would I take? How long would I live? It made me wonder about what kind of end of life care I would want, which is not something most 23 year olds think about in their free time. As a future OT, I am frustrated that there is no cure for ALS and that we are just forced to treat the symptoms. ALS forces the health care team to be reactive rather than proactive. At this point, we can only hope that O'Brien, and others in his situation, can live long enough for a cure to be found.


If you are interested in watching Transfatty Lives, you can find it on Netflix.

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