This post is my memory of my grandmother’s Huntington’s disease symptoms that I remember. As I write about my grandmother’s Huntington’s disease it is a very emotional memory for me. My grandmother was in her mid-forties when I was born. She was a simple woman. My grandmother was raised to be a housewife and mother. I am not even sure she had more than a grade-school education. It was not common back then. I remember from growing up the expectation for my grandmother was to raise children and manage the household. My grandmother never worked outside of the house that I ever knew. My fondest memory of my grandmother was that she made the best tasting mashed potatoes that I knew. I would always try to figure out her secret to making mashed potatoes. I think it was the love that she put into everything. As a young child Huntington’s disease was not even a thought in my mind.
It wasn’t until I was about ten that our family lived close enough to my grandparents that we were able to visit them a lot. Our family would go to visit them at least 2-3 times a month. On the weekends we made the 2-and-a-half-hour drive to where they were living at the time. My grandmother would have been in her mid-fifties. I was not sure if any of my family knew about Huntington’s running in our family. I don’t ever remember being told about it back then about Huntington’s disease. My parents and grandparents may have known. But no one talked about it, at least not to me. I vaguely remember hearing that one of my grandmothers’ relatives, maybe an uncle of hers, had Huntington’s. He died at a young age of it.
My very first memory of anything different in my grandmother I was probably in my early teens. One of the Huntington’s symptoms I remember was a facial twitch in my grandmother. She would have been in her late fifties by then. The facial twitch in my grandmother was very subtle. I thought nothing about the twitch back then. As my grandmother started to progress through her sixties, I started to notice that grandmother would on occasion do an extended arm twist movement and yelp or yip after doing it. None of these movements interfered with her ability to perform her activities of daily living. She was able to cook, clean, do laundry and take care of the house as she always had been. She lived in a one-story house so didn’t have to manage stairs. At times she would lose her balance and fall, and she was just brushing it off as not being born graceful.
I don’t remember any mental changes in my grandmother back then; she didn’t seem to forget things or not be able to do her wife and motherly duties. My parents and grandparents would play cards games together. I can’t say that I really remember any mental decline in my grandmother at that time. My grandmother always seemed to be engaged in what was going on and contributed to the conversation. Â
