In the beginning

My grandmother got Huntington's Disease from her father. She and my grandfather had 5 children. My grandmother was already in a nursing home when I was born and we would visit her but I never knew what was wrong with her. You see, Huntington's Disease isn't talked about in a lot of families - it's like this big dark secret. My dad was the first of the siblings to begin showing symptoms in his early 30's. He was always an angry man but the disease made him worse. He became violent with my mom and with us. He started having problems remembering how to work on machines at work. And his hands began to shake. He went to the doctors at Vanderbilt and at that time all they could do for him was give him Haldol. There were no anti-depressants like there are today. He wasn't sure the Haldol was working and increased his dose and ended up shooting and killing himself. He was only 37 years old. I was 7, my sister Kim was 6 and Angie was 13. He had always said that he would not let us see him suffer like he did his mom. And I always thought that was horrible but now I understand. Within a year, his mom also died. And over the course of the next several years we would learn that 2 of my aunts also had HD - both of them would also commit suicide. We would also find out that my dad's brother had HD, he would be the only one to actually live out the course of the disease. So we had one aunt that didn't get HD out of 5. Those odds suck!
A year after my dad died, my mom met a great man at church and married him. He had 2 sons and she had 3 daughters, we were almost like the Brady Bunch. Only we weren't that happy right away. You can imagine how thrilled I was to have a house with boys! But once they were married, it was easy to lose touch with my dad's side of the family. Especially since they were not close to begin with. And the fact that we could avoid thinking or talking about HD, made it even easier. So for several years we only talked about HD a little and my mom kept in touch with my aunt every now and then and that was okay with us. But unfortunately, time ticks and you can't avoid it forever.


Today I am thankful that I have the kids are off on fall break so we can slow down a little.