Man, 27, diagnosed with ALS shares the terrifying first symptoms he experienced

The first signs of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), also known as Motor Neuron Disease, for Mikey Stone felt 'weird' but he 'didn't think anything of it at the time'.

27-year-old Mikey was living and working in Colorado when the first symptoms appeared, and he's been open about what he's going through on social media.

Speaking about his first symptoms, Mikey said it was around three or four years ago that he first began to get a strange feeling in his foot.

He said: "I was working as a server when I was living in Colorado and I noticed that my left foot felt a little weird. That's the only way I can describe it, at first it just felt weird."

At the time he was working as a server so he spent a lot of time on his feet and didn't get a chance to sit down so he 'didn't think anything of it' other than it might be a consequence of his job.

Sadly for Mikey the strange feeling only progressed with time.

"That weird feeling kind of turned into this stiffness, and then that stiffness went up into my left calf," he told his over 450,000 followers on TikTok.

"Slowly it started to spread, I also started to notice some twitching in my muscles in those areas.

"That also started to spread throughout my body over the next couple of years. Didn't really think much about it at first, eventually got to the point where I was having trouble walking."

With his legs feeling 'heavy, weak and really tired', Mikey described the feeling like 'walking through the shallow end of a pool'.

He'd previously told People that some of his other early symptoms included a loss of movement in his foot which made him trip up at work, with doctors telling him it was probably a sign he was working too much.

Mikey looked thinner and was walking differently, saying he was 'like a pirate on a peg leg', and when he felt 'feverish and foggy' at a friend's birthday where he also felt a stabbing pain in his stomach doctors in the emergency room told him it was likely coronavirus.

He spent around three years going to various doctors and specialists in an effort to work out what was happening to him, until he ended up at a geneticist's office in Phoenix, Arizona where he finally learned the truth.

Mikey explained he had a 'very, very rare genetic mutation in his SLC1A2 gene', saying that only around 400 people in the world have the mutation and only a few of them suffer problems because of it.

Among those problems are ALS, and Mikey was diagnosed with the progressive neurodegenerative disease, saying his life flashed before his eyes while it was being explained to him.

In time ALS will mean he loses the ability to walk, with Mikey already having tried a wheelchair though he's hoping to stay out of it for as long as possible.

Eventually he'll also no longer be able to talk, eat or breathe, with him needing a ventilator at night.