The facility doctor's name was Dr. Reyes and she spoke with the specific, careful precision of someone who understood that medical information delivered to a non-medical professional needed to be exact without being clinical to the point of incomprehension.
She gave me thirty minutes on the phone.
I took notes the way I took all significant notes, in the compressed shorthand of a lawyer building a case, because that was what my mind did under pressure regardless of whether the pressure was a courtroom or a kitchen or a phone call from a federal medical wing that concerned my children.
The condition was called Huntington's adjacent cortical degeneration. Not Huntington's disease, which was the more well-known version, but a related disorder that shared a genetic inheritance pattern witho
