A couple of years ago, when I was generating ideas for stories for an assignment (shout out to cohort 22), I would go to my local antique store for inspiration. I was instantly drawn to a Pyrex Baster and bought it. A story very loosely forming in head but not fully realized. I have been carrying it around with me for the last two years, until I unpacked and knew immediately how I was going to use it.
Six months after my husband and I married in an abrupt ceremony in 1998. We were back in the US from Germany, where my husband's family was. He was in the US Army, and we were 'home' for Christmas. One evening, his father sat us down in the kitchen and explained to us that my husband's mother had Huntington's Disease. The reason for telling us this, then, they thought I could be pregnant - why else would we have done something so foolish?
I will probably never get over the fear in my husbands eyes that night as he left the room, leaving me standing there confused, lost and scared. I had never heard of Huntington's Disease. I did not know it was an incurable brain disease, it was fatal and that people who have the mutation have a significantly reduced life span with their quality of life rapidly declining often starting in the prime of their lives. Any child born to someone with the HD mutation, as my husband was, has a 50/50 chance of inheriting it, and so would any children they had (if they had the gene).
Several years later we would be sitting in a waiting room watching the clock tick as we waited for the result of his genetic fate. Distractedly I looked at magazines and the images on the wall, all I could see were babies and happy smiling families. When we were called into the office, we sat down directly from a large window, staring out onto a sunny beautiful day full of light. Looking at both of us, the Dr opened the envelope and asked my husband "Do you really want to know?". My world went black. My husband vowed that we were never having children, he had the gene that causes Huntington's Disease.
(if you want to find out about our journey you can see it here- Do You Really Want to Know?)
*It has a happy-ish ending-I make this sound really dire, and it was, part of me crumpled that day and I put the thought of children in box, locked away- I started crying, and my husband asked for a job! Literally asked for a job in a lab researching HD. We then went out that night to an extraordinary meal and got very drunk. When the waiter asked us what were were celebrating and we told him. We were comped very expensive champagne.
**In 2005 there would be an opportunity to do a process called IVF/PGD where they could test each fertilized eggs at an 8 cell stage for the mutation. We were the first couple in Canada to do it for a genetic disease! There were two gene negative embryos and they implanted both. Yay for science! My husband who is only now beginning to show telltale symptoms, still researches HD, something that he is committed to until he gets too sick to work.