A Family Tradition - a Column by Carlos Briceño

When I write this column every week, I try to only share the things that can, and will, affect my family’s battle with Huntington’s disease. Today, I would like to write about something that affects people with every disease and the families who care for them: voting.

I have decided to get my wife a T-shirt that reads, “It’s not you, it’s me.” I want to get it for her so she can wear it each time she visits a doctor. As if her having Huntington’s disease is not bad enough, eight months ago she started…

I’m protective, a trait typical of most men. For example, I will drive for 18 hours across the country while my wife sleeps in the passenger seat. Jill has trouble sleeping in general, and the motion of the car acts as a sedative, rocking her to sleep. Long…

When I first understood that I was going to be a writer, I did what everyone does upon discovering a passion: I wrote and wrote and wrote. I realized that the best writing gushes with precise details. That quality of writing required a lot of practice. So, I kept a…

The anniversary of my sister’s death is coming up in about a month. Rose died on Halloween last year after a massive red oak tree fell on the car she was in during a fierce storm. The car was parked in her driveway, and the tree was from a…

My wife, Jill, and I have not been to the local movie theater in months. It’s been so long that we can’t remember the last movie we saw there. By contrast, we averaged about two movies a month before the pandemic struck. With the recent reopening of our town’s theaters,…

I stumbled into my future profession when I took a creative writing class as a junior in high school. I took the class because it was an elective, something easy. In other words, it was what my teenage self considered a “blow-off,” something that didn’t require studying. Studying, I thought…

One of summer’s guilty pleasures is watching mindless movies. On a recent weekend, Jill and I watched “Bill and Ted Face the Music,” which is so egregiously and heinously bad, it’s good, dude. (This is how the time-traveling characters talk to each other. Needless to say, the dialogue is…

My mom is dying. She’s 90, has dementia, can’t walk, yells angrily at times, and lives in an assisted living home, where visitors are frowned upon because of the COVID-19 threat. Several days ago, an ambulance picked her up because she had vomited and was unresponsive. Several hours after visiting…

Last year, I wrote about the possibility of telemedicine visits for Huntington’s patients with the Huntington’s Disease Society of America’s Center of Excellence in Chicago. My wife, Jill, and I were excited about this possibility because she has “white coat syndrome.” As someone who has witnessed Jill’s anxiety,…