Generations of tears
Julie Askew, 29, smiles more often, a perpetual lift at the corner of her mouth. Her eyes, too, are deep brown. But they seem to smile. She's rail thin, wasted first by a car wreck when she was 20 and more recently by the disease that is eating away her mind and body.
They are both sisters and strangers, watching their young lives wind down inside nursing homes, held prisoner by a disease that will eventually rob them of their ability to think, to communicate, to move. It will weaken them. When they are most vulnerable and frail, an opportunistic illness like pneumonia will kill them.
Then, the disease will go after Amy's children.
Huntington's is a hideous disease. Formerly called Huntington's chorea (from the Greek word for "dance" for the jerky motions it can cause), it is marked by progressive degeneration from inside the brain. Certain brain cells waste away. Symptom severity depends on how many cells are lost.
Physicians dropped the word chorea because it implies that the dancelike movements are an integral part of the disease. Many people, however, don't have that symptom. The diagnosis was being missed.
At its worst, the disease has been compared to having Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's diseases simultaneously.
Most cruel of all, doctors say that people with Huntington's retain their memories of who and what they were before. But it destroys the ability to reason, to communicate, to focus.
Recent comments
I hope you are planning to make your story into a book. Not only...
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This story of the Bishop's is incredible. Just browsing to look...
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