Neuro Note #4

For my fourth neuro note, I watched a video on Youtube entitled "Living with Huntington's Disease". I chose this video because this is the next condition that we are studying in our course and I don't know much about it and I think watching videos of people in their everyday lives with these conditions really can open your eyes to what they have to go through. The video was from the perspective of a caregiver. Tammy Stewart takes care of her brother, Mike, who is in the late stages of Huntington's disease. He is almost fully dependent on Tammy and his mother, who also helped some, for making his food, helping him walk and transfer, and helping with his ADLs. He could still feed himself with adapted utensils, walk with a walker and assistance for safety, and communicate in barely understandable one word responses. Huntington's is a genetic disease and it is very apparent with this family. Tammy and Mike's father and sister had passed away from the disease, Mike is in the late stages, and Tammy, unfortunately, had got the diagnosis as well and is in the early stages. It gave the statistic on the video that a child has a 50% chance of having the disease if one of their parents suffered from it. 

It was very humbling to me that Tammy said that she would take care of Mike for as long as she could even with her own diagnosis. She was just having symptoms of tremors and mild depression at the time, but said that she was trying to have a positive outlook on life to keep her brain as healthy as possible. She was part of an experimental drug trial that would hopefully slow the onset of her symptoms and give her a better quality of life for more years to come than without the drug. She described Huntington's on the video as the "monster disease", which I can understand after seeing so many of your loved ones struggle because of it and then to get the diagnosis yourself as well. It was described as a disease that has some symptoms of Alzheimers, Parkinson's disease, and ALS all in one. There is no cure for this disease currently, but maybe one day with more advancements, something more can be done for people with this dilapidating disease. 

Resource:

STAT. (2019, December 4). Living with Huntington's disease. [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fNrzYEl9G0