Built at Sarah’s bedside

In August 2025, my wife Sarah was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome.

GBS doesn’t take everything at once. It takes you slowly. First her legs, then her arms, then the muscles she needed to breathe. [Within days] she was intubated in the ICU. And then it took the last things: her hands, her face, even her eyelids.

Sarah was still there. Completely. She could hear every conversation at her bedside, every alarm, every doctor talking about her in the third person. She just couldn’t answer. She was locked in: present in mind, unable to speak or move her body, except for her eyes.

I have never felt so helpless. Watching the illness overtake her, and not being able to ask the one question that mattered: what do you need?

So we built a board.

It started as a grid of letters on my laptop. I’d hold it up, or plug it into the TV in her room with an HDMI cable, and move the cursor across the rows. “Is it in this row?” I’d wait for her signal. “Is it in this row?” When we found the row, I went letter by letter until she told me yes. Then the next letter. Then the next word.

Sarah speaks in full sentences. She always has. It was slow, and some nights it was frustrating for both of us, but it was her talking, in her words, and that mattered more than speed.

That board became our lifeline. For nearly three months in the ICU, it was how Sarah told us what hurt and what she needed, how she asked when she could come off the ventilator, how she said what she wanted the nurse to know. It was how I stopped guessing and started advocating: “Sarah says…”

Nurses and doctors would walk in, see the letters on the TV and the sentence taking shape beneath them, and stop. Many told us they had never seen anything like it. Several asked where they could get one.

There wasn’t one. So, as Sarah recovered, we decided to build it properly.

YES Board is that board, rebuilt for every family and every care team that finds themselves where we were. It is faster than what we had, because it predicts the words. It remembers everything, so nobody has to write the letters down. And it turns what the patient says over the days into something the care team can act on.

The board itself is free, and always will be. Nobody should be left in silence because of a paywall.

— Erick and Sarah Gorin, Phoenix, Arizona