My Huntington’s disease sister – and a hero who strives for the unthinkable

Sharon Shaffer is my Huntington’s disease sister – and my hero.

Afflicted with progressively worse HD symptoms the past 15 years, San Diego area resident Sharon decided to once again attempt the unthinkable for someone heading into the final years of the fatal, incurable disorder: she rowed the equivalent of an aquatic marathon (26.2 miles) on a gym machine in six and a half hours.

The May 10 event, with loved ones and supporters cheering her on, was called “Sharon's Marathon Row for Huntington's Disease Awareness Month.” 

Sharon’s feat was captured in a five-minute video titled Magic on Marathon Row, produced by filmmaker Nathan Apffel, who also directed the feature-length documentary The Longest Journey, about the Shaffer nuclear family’s epic battle against Huntington’s.

A scene from Magic on Marathon Row

“When disease takes your health and mobility and will take your life, you have a choice,” the video’s overlying text says. “Meet Sharon, a real-life super woman. As Sharon’s body gives out, her determination grows. As her world contracts, her commitment to raising awareness intensifies. As her body breaks down, one thing remains consistent: her determination to fight.”

Sharon’s husband Renato told me in an e-mail that, despite her advanced HD symptoms, she did the "marathon" through “sheer perseverance.”

“It is the only exercise she is able to do without assistance,” he added.

“Sharon, you truly are an inspiration to so many,” wrote E.J. Garner, the chair of the board of the Huntington’s Disease Society of America, in response to my Facebook posting of the video. “Thank you for being such a beautiful example of persistence to fight and bringing awareness to Huntington's disease.”

“She completed a feat only few in the entire world, even healthy and athletic, would not dare approach, let alone finish,” observed LeeJ Razalan, a friend and the owner of Stay Classy CrossFit, the San Diego gym where the event took place. “Sharon's statement in life and in disease will forever ring: we shall overcome and we will finish this together."

Watch Sharon in the video below.

Advancing symptoms

The “marathon” exhausted Sharon. “She could barely move when we got home and took a good three days for full recovery,” Renato explained.

With her family’s help, Sharon has remained one of the most physically active HD-afflicted individuals I have encountered. The highly demanding CrossFit workouts have been one of her favorite activities.

Renato believes that CrossFit delayed Sharon’s need for a wheelchair.

“I also believe the people she worked out with gave her motivation,” he added. “She always looked forward to working out.”

However, Renato also described CrossFit as a “barometer” of HD progression.

In recent years she has become physically weaker, and the involuntary movements caused by HD have increased.

“We have witnessed a rapid decline in the past twelve months,” Renato wrote. “She is no longer able to walk unassisted, and her speech is becoming more labored every day. We have full-time in-home care and are so fortunate they are doing a really great job taking care of her.”

Sharon still exercises, but “it gets more difficult every week,” Renato added.

Renato allowed Sharon to row in the “marathon,” he wrote, because as symptoms worsen, exercise will become impossible. That moment will be "heartbreaking."

An upbeat family

I met Sharon about two decades ago at the HDSA-San Diego support group. With others in the breakout group for presymptomatic gene carriers like us and also the untested at-risk, we shared our fears about the disease and its consequences for our children and extended families.

The Shaffers became one of the most active supporters of the cause. Between 2005 and 2015, with Sharon, family members, and others following in support vehicles, Renato and three other riders competed four times in the Race Across America, a non-stop coast-to-coast bicycle race. They always completed the race in fewer than the required eight days.

The Longest Journey documentary chronicles the 2015 race. “In contrast with most presentations of HD I’ve witnessed in the two decades since my mother’s diagnosis for the disorder, this often emotionally wrenching film left me, an HD gene carrier, feeling upbeat,” I wrote in a review of a private screening of the film in 2016 (click here to read more). 

The closing words of Sharon’s rowing video ask viewers to learn more about Sharon’s story by watching The Longest Journey. (It’s on Amazon and free to Prime members.)

According to Renato, Amazon statistics reveal that the film has been viewed 200,000 times.

The essential goal: treatments

Sadly, I’ve witnessed how HD has overcome Sharon, transforming her from a healthy and vibrant woman into someone now dependent on a wheelchair and the assistance of others.

However, Sharon has demonstrated that, despite the ravages of the "devil of all diseases," the core of her personality has survived.

As we enter the final week of HD Awareness Month, Sharon’s gutsy fight reminds us all that we must not give up in the face of Huntington’s difficult challenges.

For me, Sharon’s devotion to exercise is a cue to spend more time swimming.

At the same time, exercise, although certainly important, has not stopped Sharon’s HD from progressing.

We need effective treatments – urgently.

In the HD movement, advocates create moments that capture the essence of the cause.

In defying seemingly insurmountable obstacles, the Shaffers remind us of the immense scientific, financial, political, and social challenges that the HD community faces in seeking to find the first effective treatment – and perhaps even a cure – for a neurological disorder.

Upbeat Huntington’s disease film, featuring undaunted family, aims for 10 million viewers

The Longest Journey – a new feature-length documentary film about Huntington’s disease – portrays the undaunted Shaffer family in an epic battle.

In June 2015, for the fourth time in ten years, Renato Shaffer of San Diego led a team of four men in the Race Across America (RAAM), a non-stop bicycle race from the pier in Oceanside, CA, to the boardwalk in Annapolis, MD. (In 2008, Renato also led an HD team in the Race Across the West.)

Their goal: to raise awareness about HD and support the effort to save Renato’s 48-year-old wife Sharon and 30,000 other Americans from the devastating, fatal neurological disorder and prevent it from striking the Shaffers’ two untested, at-risk daughters, Alexa, 25, and Taylor, 20.

Beautifully shot and directed by rising filmmaker Nathan Apffel and with inspirational sound design by Brandon Puda, The Longest Journey captures the heights and depths of the 3,200-mile race, which riders must complete in eight days or face disqualification.

“My motivation is, yeah, I’m going to suffer for seven days, but somebody with HD – they’re suffering until the end,” 50-year-old Renato says in the film. “After seven days, I get off my bike, I’m feeling good, but with HD, each day makes it worse, gets worse, gets worse, until the end, you’re just a shell of the person you used to be.”

However, as in the RAAM, the Shaffers haven’t given up the fight against HD. Along with Nathan, they want the film to help bring a cure.

In contrast with most presentations of HD I’ve witnessed in the two decades since my mother’s diagnosis for the disorder, this often emotionally wrenching film left me, an HD gene carrier, feeling upbeat.

Seeing Sharon strive to overcome HD with the help of workouts and the RAAM team compete in an event that would challenge even the best-trained Olympic athletes, I felt newly motivated to exercise, a scientifically proven way to promote brain health.

I was also inspired to renew my commitment to advocacy.

Huntington’s is so cruel. It was refreshing to see someone offer a more hopeful interpretation.

Nathan, in his role as narrator, indicates this intention at the outset: “And you might be sitting there thinking, ‘Great, another movie about getting older, the age clock spinning faster, and the happiest times were when you were a child and hadn’t faced the music yet.’ Well, I’m hoping for all our sakes this movie’s a bit bigger than that.”

You can watch the film trailer by clicking here.

Marketing the film

Nathan and producer LeeJ Razalan, a RAAM supporter and Shaffer family friend, held a private screening of the film for friends and family members in San Diego on May 19. About 200 people attended the screening, which also served as a fundraiser.

In an interview after the screening, Nathan said he expects to release the film in the next three to six months. His previous films and programs have appeared on Netflix, Bravo, Hulu, and ESPN, and he hopes to place this film with an online streaming site, aiming for ten million viewers.

Nathan, LeeJ, and the Shaffers want to educate as many people as possible about HD, and to raise funds for research.

The professional quality of The Longest Journey, its potentially wide viewership, and its positive outlook could make it a successful awareness-building vehicle.

Renato Shaffer (left), Sharon Shaffer, LeeJ Razalan, and Nathan Apffel (photo by Gene Veritas, aka Kenneth P. Serbin)

Fighting until she can’t fight

We learn in the 75-minute documentary that Renato married his high school sweetheart despite knowing her father had HD and that she might have inherited the genetic defect.

“She’s fighting a good fight,” he says. “At this stage, her father was already pretty far gone. She’s 48 now, and at least she can still speak, she can still communicate. She still has a little bit of freedom to do what she needs to do, as opposed to her father, who pretty much gave up.

“When he found out that he had it, he tried to kill himself a couple times. Not Sharon. She’s fighting until she can’t fight anymore.”

“It scares me that my whole family’s out there,” Sharon, her speech slurred by HD, says about the dangers of the long race, which originated in 1982. “There’s been deaths. There’s been accidents, so many accidents.”

Some teams “never come back the same,” she adds. Already by Colorado, 24 teams had to quit the 2015 race, unusually grueling because of extremely hot weather in the West, as shown in the film.

In past races, Sharon helped as a support team member on the road. In 2015 HD kept her home. She flew to Maryland with other family members on the last day.

Valiant people

Everybody in The Longest Journey is on a personal mission against HD, including Nathan, whose HD-affected brother-in-law has two young, at-risk children.

Nathan skillfully interweaves scenes from the Shaffer team’s spectacular athletic performance with interviews with Sharon, Renato, his teammates, and the Shaffer daughters and their boyfriends.

Also interviewed is Sharon’s physician, Jody Corey-Bloom, M.D., Ph.D., the director of the Huntington’s Disease Society of America (HDSA) Center for Excellence for Family Services and Research at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Corey-Bloom explains the causes and symptoms of Huntington’s, providing a counterpoint to scenes in which we see Sharon speaking or fighting to overcome her condition.

As disabling symptoms gradually appear, HD patients “absorb” many “blows,” Dr. Corey-Bloom says.

“These are young people struck down at very productive points in their lives,” she adds. “There’s a valiant nature to people.[…] People are just so amazing in the way they handle it and deal with it and just try to keep going on.”

The desire to survive

The Longest Journey bravely ponders HD’s endpoint: death.

“I think the hard thing for people to […] talk about is that it’s fatal,” Dr. Corey-Bloom comments.

However, The Longest Journey doesn’t dwell on death. On the contrary, it focuses on the RAAM, the Shaffers’ efforts to defeat HD, and their large network of supporters.

Sharon is living with her HD, and her family along with her, to the greatest extent possible.

Sharon and her family do CrossFit exercises in the Shaffer garage, converted into a gym.

Nathan projects Sharon’s desire to survive and her family’s hopes for a cure by focusing on their expressions during interviews and moments of the RAAM.

“I still feel: what an amazing lady,” says Dr. Corey-Bloom, recalling that Sharon before HD onset was articulate and employed by a drug company. “She is tough. I am sure there must be days when she sort of thinks, ‘Why am I even bothering?’ She’s out there. She campaigns for things. Renato makes that grow.

“These are two people who, at least in San Diego, everyone looks up to.”

Sharon and Renato (photo by Gene Veritas)

Good-natured and humorous

Nathan balances the many difficult challenges of RAAM and the struggle against HD with moments of humor and optimism.

“It’s only the end of the first day, and I didn’t know a body could sweat as much as I’ve sweat in the last few hours,” he observes. “Our vehicle’s already starting to smell like day-old beef stroganoff.”

Alexa good-naturedly refers to sister Taylor as a “neat freak” who bought “ten Glade air fresheners” for the two vans the riders eat and sleep in when off the road.

“Mother nature beat us up a little bit,” observes teammate Jason Tate, 45, about the winds and heat.

These and other moments made the audience laugh.

Wisdom on HD

Through the interviews with the Shaffers and their friends, The Longest Journey offers much wisdom for the HD community.

The documentary exemplifies how families can unite – not split – when faced with the myriad challenges of HD. It also demonstrates how people like LeeJ, a friend with no blood connection to HD, provide crucial support for the cause.

As HD advocacy, The Longest Journey can potentially draw out of the “HD closet” those individuals and families needed as volunteers at events and in research studies and clinical trials.

Projecting optimism

Like The Lion’s Mouth Opens, Removing the Mask, and other films about HD, The Longest Journey offers a unique perspective.

After the screening, some attendees had tears in their eyes. However, the audience also applauded enthusiastically.

In talking with the audience, Nathan and LeeJ projected optimism.

I believe that optimism is indeed the film’s most important quality. I listened with great interest to Nathan and LeeJ’s recollections and their plans to attract viewers.

They recalled how the project was born after Nathan met Sharon, who was wearing a RAAM t-shirt, met at the 2015 HDSA-San Diego Hope Walk.

“Everything was serendipitous up to today,” said Nathan.

He explained that a film like this normally costs $300,000 to $500,000.

“The coolest part is that we made this one for 20,000 bucks,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot of blood and sweat equity put into this.”

Noting that he shot the film in 4K (ultra high-definition) resolution/high dynamic range, the next generation TV technology, he added: “We’ve future-proofed this film for the next ten years.”

As of that evening, Nathan and LeeJ still needed $8,000 to reach their $20,000 basic budget. In an e-mail the next day, LeeJ announced that donations from the screening amounted to $9,000.

LeeJ with racing bike to be raffled to support the HD cause (photo by Gene Veritas)

A raw and authentic story

They will now focus on marketing the film, including film festival submissions.

“This is my strongest [film], hands down,” Nathan told the audience. “I think it has the heart and the quality. I want to open or close Sundance or a really, really big festival.”

LeeJ calls The Longest Journey a “raw and authentic instrument to share the story of HD.” As a slogan to accompany the film, they’re considering “better together,” a reflection of its emphasis on family and community unity.

As Sharon states at the end of the film, in a message relevant for all HD families: “My advice would be to just continue to love yourself and your family.”

To donate to the Shaffers’ efforts to combat HD, click here.

Renato (left) and Nathan (photo by Gene Veritas)

Sharon’s inspirational journey with CrossFit in the fight against Huntington’s disease

With her indomitable spirit Sharon Shaffer has not given up the fight against Huntington’s disease, despite a decade of struggling with symptoms that forced her to quit her job and stop driving, and which hamper her ability to speak.

On December 7, Sharon starred in her own HD educational fundraiser, “Sharing Sharon’s CrossFit Journey” (#CureHuntingtons and #SharingSharonsJourney). The event raised nearly $2,000 to support Sharon and her family’s plans to hold a much larger fundraiser for the Huntington’s Disease Society of America (HDSA).

More importantly, it gave several dozen participants and onlookers in the CrossFit gym insight into Sharon’s practice of regular, intense exercise as a strategy for slowing the inevitable progression of her untreatable condition.

“I believe that CrossFit has helped me bounce back from major falls and accidents that I have had,” Sharon, assisted by daughter Alexa, said in a speech before CrossFit trainers led her and participants through a regimen of exercises. “Although my balance, swallowing, and speech are worsening, I am confident that without exercise my symptoms would be worse.”

You can watch Sharon tell of her struggles with HD and her involvement with CrossFit in the video below, with an introduction by Lee Razalan, the owner of Stay Classy CrossFit, the gym that sponsored the event.

A rigorous workout

The trainers at Stay Classy CrossFit, a central San Diego outlet that is part of a national network of gyms, designed a program for the Shaffers’ event. It was geared specifically for HD-affected individuals.

Along with the other participants, I jumped on a box, lifted weights, swung on a pull-up bar, and did pushups and squats.

We rotated among the five exercise stations every 90 seconds, moving through the entire sequence three times over about 17 minutes.

The #CureHuntingtons WOD (workout of the day) (photo by Taylor Shaffer)

I found the workout very rigorous. Indeed, I had to stop several times to catch my breath.

Over the next couple of days, my muscles felt considerably sore. But it was a good soreness, the kind you get from using neglected muscles. Today one of my doctors gave me the go-ahead to stick with CrossFit, but only as long as I don’t overdo it.

It occurred to me that HD people and presymptomatic gene carriers such as I need more events such as this to help us refocus on exercise and holistic approaches to the disease.

For Sharon, CrossFit has not just served to stimulate her brain and strengthen her muscles, but also linked her to a whole new network of friends who literally support her as she sometimes stumbles through the exercises.

In addition to Stay Classy Crossfit, the event received support from Lululemon and Sushi on a Roll.

You can watch the CrossFit participants, including me, in the videos below.

Racing Across America – again

The Shaffers put on “Sharing Sharon’s CrossFit Journey” in preparation for their fourth participation in the Race Across America (RAAM), a coast-to-coast, non-stop bicycle race from the pier in Oceanside, CA, to the boardwalk in Annapolis, MD. The Shaffers’ participation in the June 2015 event requires donations in kind and funds to cover such costs as a motor home to accompany the riders.

The Shaffers’ “Team 2 Cure Huntington’s Disease” participated in RAAM in 2006, 2007, and 2010, anchored by Renato. He also led a team in the Race Across the West in 2008.

These and affiliated events such as annual RAAM golf tournaments have raised more than $110,000 for HDSA. “Team 2 Cure HD” has also increased awareness about HD across the nation.

In addition to Renato, the 2015 team includes RAAM veterans John Sylvester and Jason Tate and newcomer Mikel Clementi. Their 2015 goal is to net $40,000 or more.

Renato Shaffer (photo by Gene Veritas)

Inspiration

Renato and his three team members have completed past RAAM events in less than ten days. To call RAAM grueling is a gross understatement, especially since Renato turns 50 today, December 9.

In their RAAM donation request letter, the Shaffers describe the race as “both physically and emotionally taxing” but that pales before “the realities that HD patients suffer from on a daily basis. Over the past ten years our family has changed drastically with the progression of Sharon’s symptoms. Nonetheless we live with purpose, hope and gratitude. Our purpose is to shed light on HD, to maintain realistic hope despite Sharon’s circumstances and always remain grateful for the selflessness of others who have helped us.”

Renato, the RAAM team members and support staff, the extended Shaffer family, and supporters and friends of the HD cause draw deep inspiration from Sharon.

“My goal […] is to try to succeed at things that people would deem impossible given my condition,” said the 48-year-old Sharon, who has practiced CrossFit for five years. She believes that all HD-affected individuals can discover an activity or hobby for keeping active.

“Huntington’s does not define us,” she said. “It’s just another fork in the road.”

At the conclusion of the CrossFit program, we participants all gathered around Sharon and one of the trainers as he reflected on the purpose and the lessons gained.

I touched Sharon’s shoulder. She and her thoughtful event for HD families had motivated me to recommit to exercise and healthy living as I face my own inevitable onset. Once again, I acquired strength from my HD sister.

We all put our arms in the middle of the circle. Then we raised them as we cheered: “Cure Huntington’s!”

(Stay tuned to this blog for updates on RAAM 2015 and how you can help. Scroll down for other photos from Sharon's event. Photos by Gene Veritas.)

Race Across America veteran and 2015 repeat participant John Sylvester

2015 Race Across America initiate Mikel Clementi

Alexa (left) and Taylor Shaffer

Sharon Shaffer and mother Fran Walker

Andrew Herndon, coordinator of the HDSA Center of Excellence for Family Services and Research at the University of California, San Diego

HD advocate and support group member Amy Anderson (left) and HD support group facilitator Sandy Jerkins