Wednesday, April 23, 2014

After a Social Security setback, HDSA steps up advocacy on Huntington’s disability criteria

The Huntington’s Disease Society of America (HDSA) is calling on the HD community and its supporters to urge the Social Security Administration (SSA) to update and expand its listing (description) of the disorder so that patients suffering from all types of symptoms can qualify for disability benefits.

Listings are medical criteria for evaluating disability claims involving diseases and disorders as determined in the Social Security Act. Written decades ago, the current SSA listing for HD mentions only the motor symptoms, the involuntary movements caused by the deterioration of the brain. However, HD also produces cognitive decline and psychiatric and behavioral issues, which usually leave patients disabled. Both of these symptom types often occur before the motor symptoms.

In the past decade, HDSA worked for the introduction of a bill in Congress, the Huntington’s Disease Parity Act, to change the HD listing and eliminate the two-year waiting period for benefits. HDSA has also directly lobbied the SSA.

Initially, the SSA responded favorably. It took a big step in April 2012 by listing juvenile onset HD as eligible for a Compassionate Allowance, thus quickening the approval of applications for benefits, which can take many months and even years and sometimes require applicants to resort to an arduous appeals process. Later that year, adult onset HD also became eligible for the allowance. (Click here to read more about Compassionate Allowance, HD, and Social Security benefits.)

However, when the SSA on February 25 released its draft of updated neurological listings – the first such revision in more than 30 years – the description for HD remained woefully inadequate.

A glaring omission

“We were certainly disappointed when the listings … made no practical advancements in the ability of their (SSA) examiners to have a true picture of the clinical manifestation of Huntington’s,” said HDSA CEO Louise Vetter in an interview today. “They continue to depend on the motor symptoms. There is a large body of knowledge obviously that gives the cognitive and behavioral symptoms equal importance in the progression of the disease.”

HDSA CEO Louise Vetter (photo by Gene Veritas)

On March 27, HDSA issued an analysis of the SSA HD listing that it posted on its website (click here to read more).

“Based upon HDSA’s analysis, this listing leaves many of the same gaps unaddressed and is worse than the listing we have now,” the society states. The proposed listing puts even more emphasis on the motor symptoms. (To obtain benefits, patients must be examined by at least one doctors and provide any medical documentation requested by SSA.)

The HDSA analysis found an “inconsistency between the listings (that do not mention any non-motor symptoms) and the preamble, which states that: ‘When these disorders result in solely cognitive and other mental function effects, we evaluate the disorder under 12.02/112.02 (for juvenile).’” The number twelve refers to the mental health listings, where general issues with neurological disorders such as HD are also described.

HDSA argues that “unless these other sections are spelled out in the listing itself, the examiner (and even a medical professional who is unfamiliar with HD) won’t know that they should look at the preamble because the person with HD appears fine in person and often lacks the insight to describe symptoms.”

The “glaring omission” of non-motor symptoms in the SSA listing “will cause individuals disabled by non-physical symptoms to be denied,” the HDSA analysis concludes.

One advocate told me privately that the SSA and HD specialists “don’t always speak the same language.” For instance, what HD specialists describe clinically as “apathy,” a hallmark symptom of HD, must be found in the SSA criteria under “anhedonia.

Educating the bureaucracy

As of this writing, the SSA point person had not responded to my phone message requesting comment on the HD listing. Cheryl Williams of the SSA Office of Medical Listings Improvement is indicated as a contact person in the Federal Register, where the SSA published the proposed neurological listings.

Vetter offered “two plausible explanations” for the inconsistency in the neurological listing.

First, the SSA is “struggling with a change in leadership” after Commissioner Michael Astrue finished a six-year term, retiring in February 2013. Astrue had approved the Compassionate Allowances and even appeared in a video made specially for the 2012 HDSA national convention. Since Astrue’s departure, SSA has operated under an acting commissioner, Carolyn Colvin. Thus, “new staff” received the task of revising the neurological listings, Vetter observed.

Second, Vetter noted the complexity and length of a document covering numerous neurological conditions.

“I recognize that it’s a tall order to conveniently define HD,” she said. “This is a bureaucracy looking for simple definitions, and HD is not easily characterized in convenient language. From that perspective, they’re trying to simplify a complex disease. That is inevitably going to lead to some gaps, and we’re calling them out on that.”

Pressing for a meeting

Vetter added that, at some level, the SSA doesn’t sufficiently understand HD. HDSA is seeking “direct dialogue” with the SSA, but so far the SSA has refused to meet.

Vetter speculated that, if the SSA meets with HD community representatives, it fears “the slippery slope” of having to meet with all disease groups.

HDSA, Vetter said, must convince the SSA of the uniqueness and complexity of HD and therefore the need for more “guidance” for the medical examiners who determine whether HD patients receive disability benefits.

“We should be granted an exception,” she declared. “We won’t take no for an answer on this one.”

How to send a message to Social Security

HDSA CEO Louise Vetter has formally submitted the HDSA analysis as a comment for SSA consideration, as have several dozen other HD advocates and family members.

Vetter urged HD advocates, family members, and supporters to also submit comments to the SSA. You can view others’ comments and add your own by clicking here. Your can simply state that you support the HDSA's input on the Huntington's listing, or you can leave a personalized comment of greater length.

The deadline for comments is April 28.

Removing barriers to understanding HD

Advocacy on this issue forms part of a larger effort by HDSA and the HD community in favor of the Huntington’s Disease Parity Act of 2013, a bill that would direct the SSA to update and expand its HD listing and waive the two-year waiting period for HD patients to receive Medicare benefits.

The current setback is “not a reflection on the HD community’s momentum at all,” Vetter said. “I know that we still have many strong advocates in the SSA. They are trying to find a way to accommodate HD in a complex process. Hopefully they’ll be able to accomplish that quickly. I don’t think we should be disheartened.”

Little by little, HD advocates are “removing barriers” to understanding of the disease, she added.

To learn more about how you can assist with HD advocacy, contact the nearest chapter of HDSA or write advocacy Jane Kogan, HDSA’s manager of education and advocacy, at jkogan@hdsa.org.

Thursday, April 17, 2014

Woody Guthrie, Huntington’s disease, and our duty to improve caregiving

By revisiting the huge, long-abandoned New Jersey mental hospital where radical songwriter and performer Woody Guthrie struggled for five years with the symptoms of Huntington’s disease, photographer and author Phillip Buehler provides us with a valuable new perspective on the crisis in care for people disabled by neurological disorders.

In Woody Guthrie’s Wardy Forty: Greystone Park State Hospital Revisited (Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc., 2013, 162 pages), Buehler, a specialist on derelict buildings, captures the rooms, corridors, and grounds of the psychiatric facility that housed Guthrie between 1956 and 1961. It had over 6,000 patients and had some 2,000 employees at its height in the 1960s.

A companion volume, Woody Guthrie’s Wardy Forty: The Interviews, provides background from those who knew Guthrie or are involved in the campaign against Huntington’s. (Click here to purchase the books.)


Woody Guthrie (above) and the new books about his time at Greystone Park State Hospital (below) (photos from www.woodyguthrie.org)



Utterly debilitated and unable to speak, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, the composer of “This Land is Your Land,” died of Huntington’s at Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens, NY, in October 1967 at the age of 55.

Today the United States has an estimated 5.4 million Alzheimer’s disease patients, and an additional 14.9 million family members and friends cope with the disease as caregivers or in other ways. About one million people suffer from Parkinson’s disease.

Huntington’s disease (HD) patients number 30,000, with an additional 150,000-250,000 at risk. The government classified HD as an “orphan,” or rare, disease because of the relatively small number of people affected (fewer than 200,000). Numerous other disorders have similar symptoms. By mid-century, as many as 120 million people worldwide will suffer from dementia.

The world must shoulder a massive caregiving burden. Most people affected by such illnesses will require care ranging from in-home assistance to admission to a nursing home.

While researchers have made strides studying the symptoms, causes, and treatment of these conditions, caregiving has not advanced. Professional caregivers typically earn very low wages and receive little training. Even many doctors cannot properly diagnose rare disorders such as HD.

“Long term care remains a scandal in the United States,” Alice Wexler, Ph.D., a board member of the HD-related Hereditary Disease Foundation and author of two books on the disease, writes in a brief history of the disease included in Buehler’s book. “Persons living with HD and their loved ones – and all those with chronic neurodegenerative and psychiatric illnesses – still struggle mightily to find appropriate and affordable support and care, at home while they are still able, in facilities when they are not.”

In a case that shocked the HD community, in May 2013 a 49-year-old, late-stage HD patient was allegedly strangled in an Oregon nursing home by another patient whom police described as suffering from “severe dementia.”

To complicate matters further, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act does not provide protection to people seeking life, disability, and long-term care insurance. Thus, as genetic testing, including full DNA sequencing, promises to become ubiquitous, people run the risk of not getting the coverage they will most need as they live ever longer lives. Only three states (California, Oregon, and Vermont) prohibit this type of discrimination.

Lives instantly transformed

My own family has struggled with Huntington’s disease since the late 1980s, when my mother Carol Serbin started having strange swings in mood. A few years later, she developed chorea, the involuntary movements most Huntington’s sufferers develop, causing some to appear as if they are dancing.

Nobody in the family understood what was wrong until in 1995 a neurologist suspected Huntington’s. Just two years before, researchers had concluded a two-decade quest to find the disease-causing gene, which they called “huntingtin,” like the disease named for the American physician George Huntington.

In 1872, Dr. Huntington published an article describing HD’s symptoms and definitively establishing it as a genetically transmitted condition. Everybody has this gene, which is essential for life, but when it expands beyond its normal size, it causes brain cells to die. The discovery of the gene allowed for a definitive test for the disease, though, unfortunately, science has yet to provide effective treatments, much less a cure.

Receiving the news of my mother’s diagnosis the day after Christmas 1995, my wife Regina and I saw our lives transformed before us in an instant. With no treatment or cure, HD was fatal. All children of an affected parent had a 50-50 of inheriting the condition. Most people experience disease onset between the ages of 30 and 50, and everybody with a certain degree of gene expansion or greater will develop the condition.

My mother’s diagnosis and the fear that I might carry the genetic expansion compelled me to fight back in any way I could. Regina and I immediately started attending the local support group of the Huntington’s Disease Society of America (HDSA), and I became an HDSA advocate.

I began writing about my experiences in this blog. Because of fear of genetic discrimination, until recently, I performed all of this behind the scenes, for example writing under a pseudonym, Gene Veritas.

The fear that I carried the mutation led Regina and me to postpone starting a family. By 1999, however, we agreed to try. First, I decided to get tested. I was especially worried about transmitting the mutation, because sometimes men pass on an even longer expansion, resulting in an early-onset form known as juvenile Huntington’s.

Our worst fears were confirmed: I had the same expansion as my mother and would likely develop the disease in my forties or fifties.

We then embarked on the most difficult decision of our lives: the testing of our daughter in the womb (so-called preimplantation genetic diagnosis was not yet available). After weeks of waiting for the results, we received the happiest news of our lives: our “miracle baby” was HD-free! Today Bianca is a thriving middle school student.

The genetic mirror

Throughout this period, I juggled my roles as college professor, father and husband, and Huntington’s disease advocate – all while watching my mother’s inexorable decline. In addition to her psychiatric symptoms and chorea, she suffered from the third manifestation of the HD triad: cognitive loss and dementia.

“Each encounter with my mom became a view into a nightmarish genetic mirror,” I wrote to a physician friend who included my story anonymously in a September 2005 Washington Post article on HD. “I watched her body jerk, head bob, and fingers fret. One night I found her wandering around our house confused and half naked. Within a year she lost most of her capacity to speak. She ate clumsily with her hands.”

Around that time, because my “HD warrior” and caregiver father Paul could no longer care for my mother at home, he placed her in a nursing home. She died quietly in her sleep in February 2006, at 68.


Paul and Carol Serbin (photo by Gene Veritas)

Finally seeing the beauty

Following Guthrie through the pages of Buehler’s books, I was prompted to reflect on my relationship with my mother as she struggled with HD as well as on how our system of caregiving must improve.

Disease communities are used to emphasizing the devastation of the their particular conditions. The devastation is real. But there is more to the person than the illness. I regret not having the emotional strength and presence of mind to have seen my mother more as a person and less as a mind and body racked by the symptoms of Huntingons. Because I had tested positive for the mutation, often my fear of HD kept me from sitting down with her and attempting to converse, I once wrote.

In the Foreword to The Interviews, Guthries daughter Nora recalls her own hesitancy as a 15-year-old to reach out to her father and how she ultimately learned to appreciate the man who, despite HD, understood his daughters feelings, a man who possessed twinkling eyes and a mischievous grin, releasing us all to live our own lives completely and wonderfully, taking each day and each situation as it comes. Her father lived with this disease, but he never became Huntingtons disease.

As I turn these pages, I can finally see a beauty that has taken me over fifty years to recognize, Nora writes of Buehlers photographs of the hospital where she, her mother Marjorie, and brothers Arlo and Joady visited Guthrie on the weekends and held picnics on the lawn, the children often playing in a large tree their father dubbed the magicky tree. These images are merely ruins, the gross leftovers, the little pieces, chipped and peeling fragments of a life felt and lived so vividly and boldly.

Discrimination and misdiagnosis

The Guthries story became my familys story, too. I remembered how I had travelled from my home in San Diego to visit my mother in the nursing home in suburban Cleveland shortly before she died. She shared a room with a woman paralyzed from the neck down. The attendants tried to feed my mother but didnt give her much more than a few spoonfuls before quitting. Always patient, my father had done a better job of feeding her when she was still at home. He would feed her once a day at the nursing home, too. Still, she was losing energy, slowly slipping towards death.

As the books recount, Guthrie faced the kind of discrimination still faced by HD people today: police officers and member of the general public often believe that HD people are drunk. In 1956, Guthrie was picked up by New Jersey state troopers, who thought he was a vagrant. Only after a phone call from a friend did the troopers comprehend that he needed medical attention.

At first, the medical personnel at Greystone refused to believe Guthries claims to have written thousands of songs. Instead, they described him as delusional and diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic. HD is frequently misdiagnosed, in part because many doctors have little or no knowledge of the disease.

Paranoid schizophrenia was a very common misdiagnosis as were others including Parkinsons disease, Alzheimers, all kinds of psychiatric illnesses and people were just locked away, says Dr. Michael Hayden, a world-renowned HD expert and leader in the quest for treatments, in an interview with Buehler.

It took years to discover the cause of my mothers difficulties. She, too, had received different diagnoses, and some of her doctors seemed indifferent or unwilling to get her to the right specialist. At first she was put on Haldol, an anti-psychotic also used to try to control chorea in HD. I quickly learned, however, that neurologists who understood HD avoided Haldol because of negative side effects, so we got her off of it as quickly as possible.

A difficult environment

The first two images in Buehlers work are Guthries Greystone intake photographs, which Buehler found in the basement of the admissions building, shown on the next page in a recent shot by the author. Later we come across Guthries bed in Ward 18 of the clinic building.


Images of Greystone Park State Hospital and a letter written there by Woody Guthrie (photos from www.woodyguthrie.org)

I remember one time walking through the entire ward with beds lined on both sides to get to my fathers bed at the very end, Nora recalls in the accompanying text. The walk seemed to take forever. All around us were strange people yelling, talking to themselves, uninhibited or somber.

Ive learned that most HD patients are mixed in with individuals with other conditions in facilities where personnel have little, if any, knowledge of HD. HD family members must often educate health personnel about the disease. Perhaps my mother would have lived longer had there been a nursing home with appropriate enrichment activities for her condition.

Guthrie lived most of the time in Ward 40, which, with his typical mirth, he nicknamed Wardy Forty, as in the 1956 letter that appears in the book. Although HD by this time had robbed Guthrie of his ability to play guitar, he continued to write frequently, although ever less legibly.

My mother was always in charge of balancing the family checkbook and writing Christmas cards. For a while after HD struck, she continued these activities. She used a ruler to make perfectly straight lines on which to write addresses. She eventually lost the ability to write.

A caregivers dedication

In a 1956 play titled My Forsaken Bibel [sic], written at Greystone, Guthrie responds to a friends question about how he inherited HD from his mother: Hit my mother Nora Belle when she was about 40. Made her just go into such violent fits and such violent kinds of spasms that, well, she just wreckd [sic] and just wracked every single house we did live in. My cardiographer over yonder in Brooklyn just told me my mothers chorea sorta passled [sic] on to me here. Nora Belle died in an Oklahoma mental hospital in 1929.

My mother loved to sew. I remember the Halloween costumes and other clothing she made for me. One day she just stopped. She left scores of patterns unused. Like Guthrie, I love writing. I have already passed my mothers age of onset. How much longer before HD erodes my ability to express myself? Will I need to go into a nursing home? Will a treatment be found?

Marjorie loved and cared for Guthrie despite the fact that they had separated about a decade earlier because of strains over the disease. They eventually divorced. Near the end of Wardy Forty, Buehler places photographs of the couple at her Queens home, where she would take her husband for visits.

She stripped him of his clothes and scrubbed him in the bath, sprinkling him with talcum powder and singing, 'Doesnt he smell sweet now!' Nora recalls in the accompanying text. She would wash and iron his clothes, sew up the tears, and dress him like a mother dressing her child for a first day of school.

Once my father, daughter, and I went with my mother to a park. My mother needed to use the rest room. We had to lift her from her wheelchair and maneuver her clumsy and unresponsive body into the stall. It was like moving dead weight. She nearly fell. When she was finished, we had to repeat the process in reverse. Later, in her final months of life in the nursing home, my father visited her every day. Dejected by her death, his own dementia worsened dramatically. A year after she died, he started taking a large, beautiful, framed picture of her wherever he went, including restaurants. In 2009 he, too, died in a nursing home

Time to stop throwing away people

The final two images of Buehlers book are of Guthries Greystone discharge photos from April 1961, which contrast with the 1956 frontal intake photo. Initially, Guthrie looks into the camera. His expression is sad, but he appears relatively healthy. Upon discharge, however, he casts his eyes downward, typical of the difficulty HD-affected individuals have with visual focus. He appears to have lost much weight.

Arlo was 19 when his father died. That same year, he released the song Alices Restaurant, a protest of the Vietnam War draft. In 1969 he starred in the Hollywood movie based on the song and performed at the Woodstock Festival. Arlo himself never tested for HD and has not shown symptoms.

In Wardy Forty, Arlo has a strong message about Greystone and its residents: These places were built so that they wouldnt be a burden on society. You could throw away your odd child, put him in one of these towns, almost like sending people to Australia from England years ago. Penal colonies. And so its no wonder why they ended up in this sort of notoriously bad scene. They were set up from the very beginning to be away from the world, and not be part of it. Greystone is a real monument to that.

The idea behind Greystone still largely governs our outlook on care for the neurologically disabled.

People across the country are acting to correct the situation. Maria Shriver and former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day OConnor both lost loved ones to Alzheimers have warned the public of the Alzheimers tsunami about to hit America.

In Vermont, HD activists successfully advocated for state laws preventing inappropriate transfers of nursing facility residents and requiring public assistance for home-based and community-based care. At the national level, HDSA is pressuring Congress and the Social Security Administration to update long-outdated and inaccurate disability criteria for HD and to waive the two-year waiting period for patients to receive Medicare benefits.

Responding to press reports of corruption and abuses and requests from advocates, California state legislators in January announced twelve bills aimed at addressing the inadequate care in the state’s assisted living facilities and nursing homes.

Indeed, the time has come to develop a more compassionate society by valuing both the person cared for and the caregiver.

Sunday, April 13, 2014

Reshaping my career and life in the face of Huntington’s disease (and a note of hope)

In the second half of the 1990s, after learning of my mother’s diagnosis for Huntington’s disease, the 50-50 chance of having the genetic mutation unsettled me greatly. One way I dealt this was to throw myself into my career.

The fear that I would follow in my mother’s footsteps and lose my ability to work frequently caused me to panic. I was just 36, but the future seemed bleak because I witnessed in my mother and other HD patients the terrible devastation of the disease. She was declining rapidly. I thought my own decline could occur at any time and was convinced that, at best, I wouldn’t get very far into my 40s before HD hit.

Striving to achieve the academic milestone of my first book – the gold standard for recognition for professional historians – I sometimes wrote as many as 14 hours per day.

The quest for success – I was already thinking about my professional legacy – served as a powerful form of denial.

Family first

During that now seemingly crazy but certainly understandable response, I often neglected my relationship with Regina, my wife. Regina had stood by my side throughout our ordeals with HD, but the long hours I worked meant fewer hours to grow with her in the marriage.

After my initial impulse to get tested for HD right after my mother’s diagnosis in late 1995, I had sensibly postponed testing to gather information about the disease and avoid the risk of genetic discrimination. Regina agreed that we should delay starting a family until we sorted out all the issues HD presented for conceiving and raising children.

However, after a few years of waiting, and approaching her mid-30s, Regina wanted a child badly.

My decision to get tested in 1999 to prepare for having a family, my subsequent positive test result, our daughter Bianca’s negative result in the womb, and her birth the following year grounded me again in the basics of life and sealed my commitment to my family.

As Bianca grew, my mother headed towards death.

Soon, rather than working overtime on professional  issues, I stepped up my HD advocacy, although always behind the scenes because of the enduring fear of genetic discrimination.

I still spent much time away from Regina and Bianca, yet I also learned to manage my week more efficiently. I reserved special moments for them, especially on the weekends.

Raising Bianca along with Regina and watching her grow into a teenager have brought me great pride and joy. There is no more important task for parents.

Although no life is risk-free, we are profoundly relieved and grateful that she will never have HD.

In my work as chair of the history department at the University of San Diego (USD), I always say “family first” to co-workers needing time off to attend to critical matters such as an ill child.

A clear purpose

In the 18 months since I exited the “HD closet” and announced the adoption of a second academic field, I’m once again reshaping my career.

I’ve reflected deeply on what professional ambition means for me. Whereas career was once top priority, today I think a lot more about human solidarity.

At home, this means keeping the focus on family. In the academic venue, it’s about viewing career as a service to students, the profession, and society. In HD advocacy, it’s a collaborative effort to speed up the discovery of treatments to save tens of thousands of people like me from the disease.

My shift in attitude results partially from my experience as a parent and the perspective on life maturity provides.

However, the fight against HD also plays a very significant role.

I especially comprehend the importance of HD when I attend conferences such as last February’s Ninth HD Therapeutics Conference, sponsored by the CHDI Foundation, Inc.

With hundreds of participants focused on the single goal of defeating HD, the feeling in the room was electric – indeed, almost surreal. The atmosphere was so intense and the connections among the participants so strong that I felt as if I were communicating telepathically with some of them.

Similarly, learning that yet another person has died from HD or juvenile HD strikes me in the pit of the stomach and redoubles my sense of urgency as an advocate.

My academic career began as a search for professional and personal fulfillment fueled with a passion for Latin America and its history. My investigation into the history of science, technology, and medicine – which includes my HD advocacy and, in this blog, an ongoing, firsthand account of living at risk – transcends the professional and the personal. It builds awareness about the global, cutting-edge efforts to improve brain health.

In short, I now have a clear purpose.

Melding career and activism

My reshaped career melds my professional training with my advocacy work. As I wrote recently, at work I raised concerns about the long-term effects of head injuries suffered by college football players.

On April 3, I attended a USD-sponsored panel discussion on ethics and genetic testing, with a focus on the direct-to-consumer genetic testing service 23 and Me. Last November the federal Food and Drug Administration ordered the company to stop selling its saliva connection kit and genome service because the agency said it had failed to demonstrate the tests’ accuracy. I made an audio recording of the USD event and took photos of the participants, who included fellow faculty members as well as two deans. I plan to report on the event in this blog. This is the first time that I have covered a USD event as an HD blogger.

During the 2014-2015 academic year, I will be on sabbatical, that is, freed from teaching and administrative duties to focus exclusively on research and related projects. During that period I plan to work on a long-gestating book on former Brazilian revolutionaries who have come to positions of power. I also aim to continue my HD advocacy, and I will prepare a new course tentatively titled “A History of the Brain,” a subject not being taught in our History department nor in any science department.

I hope that course, to be taught after I return from leave, will inspire students to become historians and to build awareness of the centrality of the brain in our lives, as well as produce more humanistic, historically-oriented science majors.

In general, I feel a growing desire to help guide young people – surely a function of being a father of a teenager and a veteran professor, but also of my solidarity work in the HD movement.

Riding a whipsaw, but content

On April 10, I flew to Providence, RI, to take part in a conference at Brown University marking the 50th anniversary of the U.S.-supported Brazilian military overthrow of the democratically elected President João Goulart.

This was the first meeting related to Brazilian studies I had attended in more than four years. The long hiatus was caused by my growing interest in the history of science, technology, and medicine.

It was also the first time I took part in a Brazilian studies event where people knew about my HD status. I received words of encouragement from several colleagues, including some who have made donations to the cause. I felt very much at ease, and I was thrilled to feel some of my old passion for Brazil return and to catch up with my colleagues.

I also brought to the conference a much sharper mental focus, obtained thanks to my participation in events such as the HD Therapeutics conferences, which, because they represent completely new and highly complex material about a life-or-death matter, require enormous concentration, energy, and openness to different perspectives.

By sheer coincidence, on April 12 the Rhode Island chapter of the Huntington’s Disease Society of America (HDSA) held its inaugural family education day at Butler Hospital, also in Providence. I took part, giving a presentation titled "Opportunities for HD Advocacy."

You can watch my presentation in the video below. For other presentations from the education day, click here to visit my Vimeo video album of the event. (I'll be adding additional presentations from the event in the next few days, so be sure to refer to the album again.)


Immediately after the family education event I got a ride to the airport with Connecticut HD activist Laura Kokoska, who updated me on her HD-stricken mother, who is 71, and her own advocacy activities.

On the morning of April 13, I led the Serbin Family Team in the third annual Team Hope Walk of HDSA-San Diego.

Flying coast-to-coast twice in less than 72 hours (with connections in Chicago), jumping from one event to another in Providence, presenting talks on both Brazilian history and HD advocacy, arising early on the 13th for the Hope Walk – it all felt like riding on a whipsaw.

No matter! I was excited to thrive and make yet wider and deeper connections in both spheres of my career.

As I've learned, my life must not serve my career, but my career my life.

A successful Hope Walk

The Hope Walk was a success, raising approximately the San Diego chapter goal of $44,000. Lead corporate sponsor Auspex Pharmaceuticals, a San Diego-based company conducting HD research, donated $10,000 to the event. Other major corporate donors included pharmaceutical firms Vertex and Lundbeck, both of which also have an HD focus.

For the second straight year, the Serbin Family Team was the top team fundraiser, with a total of more than $4,600. I wish to thank the 44 donors (individuals, couples, and families) who gave to the cause, as well as the team members who walked with us at Tidewater Park in Coronado, CA.

As in past years, the support of HD-focused firms and the participation of more than 300 people, including some of the scientists seeking treatments, lifted my spirits.

You can view the Serbin Family Team and other scenes from the Hope Walk in the photos below.


The Serbin Family Team of the 2014 HDSA-San Diego Team Hope Walk: from left to right, Dory Bertics, Bianca Serbin, Jane Rappoport, Gary Boggs, Yi Sun, Kenneth Serbin, Regina Serbin, Allan Rappoport (photo by Bob Walker)


Gene Veritas (aka Kenneth Serbin) presents 16-year-old juvenile HD patient Terry Leach with the iPad mini won by the Serbin Family Team for being the top Hope Walk team fundraiser (photo by Misty Oto).


HDSA-San Diego President George Essig addresses the crowd just before the Hope Walk begins (photo by Gene Veritas).


Hope Walk co-organizer Misty Oto addresses the crowd alongside Christian Rodriguez (left) and Terry Lopez, organizer of a Poway High School student group established last year to support the local HD community (photo by Gene Veritas).


Tim Schroeder (left), Gene Veritas, and HD support group facilitator Sandy Grofcsik


Walk participants LaVonne and Paul Cashman (left) and Jim Stone (photo by Gene Veritas)

Hope Walk participants await the start of the event (photo by Gene Veritas).