Thanks, Nightcrawler! You explained the thing about "task avoidance" really well. It's very easy for me to understand that the reason I don't want to go on a car ride is that it's hard to hold my head up that long. That's one specific muscle whose weakness is highlighted. But it's a lot harder for me to understand that the reason I don't want to go cook dinner is that doing it will involve pushing lots of other muscles that are also weak, but whose weakness isn't so apparent.

Mike, your wife is really smart. When I go to the neurologist, I try to explain how I feel by way of specific examples. So instead of saying "I get tired at night," I say, "Sometimes at night it's very difficult to get up the stairs. I can crawl up if my arms are strong, but if both my arms and legs are weak, I need my husband to lift me stair by stair."

I do this because once a well-meaning friend said to me, "How are you doing? Do you still get tired at the end of the day?" Maybe she just misphrased that, but I imagined she was thinking, "if being tired at the end of the day means you're sick, then we're all sick!"

Abby