Dear Jeanine:
I have committed a no-no. I should have known better. In fact, I do know better but I chose to speak anyway.
I told you that I do not think you have Huntington's disease.
You told me not to say that and that you try to convince yourself that everyone forgets things and has a body twitch now and then. You told me more in those few seconds about how you are then I would ever had known otherwise.
You are scared (and why wouldn't you be?) and you wonder if so many things you do are signs of this disease. I understand this too. Though you try to put it out of your mind it never completely leaves. It sneaks up on you when you least expect it and when it does it can take your breath away.
Why then did I take such liberty with my words?
I remember dad saying the same thing to me before. Others did too. Always, I ached for it to be true but I knew I could not allow myself to believe their well intentioned words because like it or not, they could be wrong.
I know this road. I walked it for almost five years. Just like you and so many others I went from one day never noticing any of these so called "symptoms" to seeing them constantly upon learning of my "at risk" status. If something were that noticeable you would think that I would have identified it prior to hearing about HD.
We all forget. We all twitch. We all get angry. Stress alone can bring these very things on in abundance. I kept forgetting to turn off the oven. I strained the spaghetti over the floor instead of the sink. I could go on and on. There were some real doozy's with me. I stumbled over my words and my feet more times than I can count.
I rarely talked about HD and often did what I call shelving. Shelving for me is much like taking a book you are reading and putting it back on the shelf for a while until you are ready to pick it back up and read some more. During the times I would shelf I would not read HD material or focus on the disease. I did not talk or even try to think about it.
I had weeks or even months where I did quite well though it always remained in the back of my mind.
