Columns

The first time I met Jill’s father was interesting. I hadn’t met someone with Huntington’s before, but Jill had told me all about it. Huntington’s was a movement disorder, and she had a 50 percent chance of inheriting it. I researched Huntington’s before meeting Jill’s father, but seeing the…

Some moments are so perfect that you wish time would stop so that some part of you could live in that moment forever. These moments can be significant milestones, such as receiving word that you’ve been accepted into your dream school or hearing that you landed the job…

We live in a golden age of communication with many ways to talk to each other — email, text, and if you’re old like me, by phone. We have many chat choices, but I want to focus on one aspect by asking you a question: How do you end conversations…

I was recently invited to talk about my column on Help 4 HD Live!, a weekly podcast for the Huntington’s disease community. The host, Lauren Holder, asked me how the revelation that I am a gene carrier has affected my relationships. I told her I…

Every time we visit my dad, we go for a walk on the beach. On a recent cool September afternoon, the four of us wandered along the water’s edge, poking at rocks and admiring the ripples in the sand. My dad was wearing his green fleece jacket, jeans, and a…

In a previous column, I wrote about how I believe it is likely for a medical breakthrough to happen by the time I am old enough to have symptoms. I need to add a caveat to that statement: It is only true if there are people doing…

I put my car in reverse and looked at my wife, Jill, in the back seat, trying valiantly to stay positive. I looked at my daughter, Alexus, in the front seat. She looked like she’d just lost her best friend, but she was talking and acting like everything was fine.

As I’ve mentioned in previous columns, my mother received her Huntington’s diagnosis almost a year ago. My parents waited to tell me until I arrived home for winter break from school because they didn’t want the news to affect the end of my semester. I…

Some things that my wife, Jill, handles — such as paying the cable bill, for example — are tasks that I need to know how to do. Huntington’s disease eventually will affect her neurologically, but not for some time. It’s not ideal, but at least we have time to…

I’m a logical person. I tend to look at the numbers and make a rational assessment of a situation. But I also want to be happily surprised rather than disappointed, so I expect the worst to be true. I describe it as being a realist…