10 Connects Hero: Mother and daughter fight fatal disease

Gulfport, Florida - Families dealing with Lou Gehrig's disease, or ALS, learn to lean on each other. That's certainly been the case for Rosalind Jeffrey and her daughter, Shelly Reale.

"There you go," says Shelly, assisting her mother into a chair.

Since Rosalind's diagnosis about a year ago, the two have shared shoulders and they've shared tears. When doctors confirmed ALS, the news was devastating. There is no cure.

"Anything else, anything else would be better because with ALS there is no hope," says Shelly.

But Rosalind, a former model, faces her future with the same grace she displayed before the cameras in her youth. Her speech is now garbled, but this mom thought ahead and, while she still could, she recorded the song Happy Birthday for Shelly.

"And, at the party, she played it and I heard her sing 'Happy Birthday' to me," says a teary-eyed Shelly. "And it was so hard. It was so hard, because I know this is the last birthday I'm going to share with my mother."

Now, Shelly is working on a gift of her own. She's spearheading a fundraiser for the ALS Association of Florida. The November bike ride is called Tour de Vie, or Tour of Life, and it honors Rosalind.

"I didn't want her to be another statistic, another person that got ALS and died, and that was it," says Shelly.

Through her computer, this is what Rosalind had to say about her daughter and what she calls a horrific disease: "And if you should get it, you will be very lucky to have a precious child like Shelly."

You can still understand a few words that Rosalind says. She tells this reporter, "Dieing is not hard." But, she says, dieing alone would be and that is something she won't have to do.

"'Cuz I'm not going anywhere," whispers Shelly.

For more information on the Tour de Vie fundraising bike ride, click here.

If you know a hero you'd like to see profiled on 10 Connects News, email Kathryn Bursch at kbursch@10connects.com.