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It all started out like this. In this very hallway. The place I first felt like I was living is now the place where I feel like I'm dying. Your probably wondering what got me from point A to point B, but point A isn't really point a. It's really point W to point Y. So how about I tell you what happened from point A to W, and tell you how I learned how to live and how I learned to love.
My name is Abigail Duncan, I'm 21 years old and I have Huntington's disease. I was diagnosed when I was 15 which is extremely rare. Most have symptoms once they are 30 to the age of 50, but not me. When I was diagnosed I had already shown most of the symptoms; the irritability, mood swings, anxiety, social withdrawal. My parents just thought it was me just being me because Ive acted that way for as long as I could remember, but in all reality it was the disease taking hold. Once I reached the end of my 14th year on this Earth I began having more problems. Those of which my family doctor could not explain. I started to have what my doctors thought was a nervous twitch. My finger would just move at random or my face would flinch as if something had landed on my skin and I was trying to shake it off without moving to much, so they prescribed me to take benedryl. It worked well, I didn't have to explain why my face would move or my finger would do something sporadic while completing a task, but after a bit the symptoms developed more. I started having trouble performing tasks that I could always do, but could not anymore. One day I was siting in class and tried to spin my pencil in between my fingers. Needless to say people don't appreciate getting hit in the head with a pencil from across the room. That same night I tried to braid my hair but couldn't. Worriedly I told my mom what was happening but she just said I must be having an off day and that ill be fine. Brushing it off I went to bed, but for whatever reason I didn't believe my moms explanation. Things just didn't feel right. Of course, as usual, I went to school trying not to think about what was going on in my life, and as usual I had another complication. I started having trouble understanding anything my teachers said. Whether it be Macbeth or geometry I couldn't grasp a single concept. I didn't even really understand the things I had learned before. It was as if my mind was becoming a one way door. Things were flowing out, but nothing could come back in to retain the previous position it once held, or to replace what was once there. And then the depression hit.
Then came the day of my 15th birthday. My parents decided to throw a surprise party for me with people I once called friends and some family members I don't usually see, thinking it would cheer me up, it didn't. I stayed off to the side. All I wanted to do was blend into the wall so everyone would leave me alone. That night was the first night in a long time I felt as though I was going crazy and that everything that was happening was just a figment of my over creative imagination. that night I started having trouble sleeping and eating. A couple days went on and finally I ha to eat. I didn't want to die, so I walked down stairs to my kitchen and asked my mom when dinner would be ready, but all I got was a stern glair and a raised eyebrow in suspicion. It was then accompanied by the question of, "Are you drunk?!" Hurriedly I tried to defend myself but everything came out a slurred mess of too rushed words for my mouth to pronounce. My mom started yelling at me about how she couldn't believe I was drinking underage and the question of what else I could possibly doing. That was the first time I had felt as if no one believed me, so I did the only thing I could actually do. I started crying.
Once I had started it felt like I could never stop. The tears continued to run down my face as though a dam had just collapsed behind my eyes. All of the frustration, the lack of understanding, and all of my loneliness was being purged from my system. I hadn't even noticed that my dad had walked in and my mom was still yelling at me until I heard him slam his brief case against the counter. At that moment my mother went silent as I continued to cry. My father then slightly tried to regain some composure and ask what and all living heck was going on. Once I heard my mother tell my father why she thought was going on I cried harder. My father couldn't believe what he was hearing, so he walked up to me and smelled my sweat shirt an breath, then turned around to tell my mother that she was wrong and continued to "rip her a new one" for speaking to me the way she did. It was silent for what felt like ages, and the only thing you could hear was the sound of my tiny gasps of breath as I tried to get a solid breath of air into my lungs because they burned. The next thing I know my father is hugging me as I cried. He stood there comforting me until I wasn't crying as hard. He then started asking questions. I tried my hardest to answer but I couldn't. After ten minutes still trying to answer the same question he gave up saying that we would talk when I was less emotional. That's when my mom called saying that dinner was ready.