One year ago, six months after my best friend passed away, her mother gave me her favorite hoodie. It's worn, pilled, the drawstrings chewed on, and the elastic starting to droop, but it smells like my friend. I wear it when I miss her most and imagine she's beside me, holding me while I reminisce, laugh, and cry. To anyone else, it's a cheap sweater. To me, it's all I have left of my best friend in the world.

I received one of the worst insults recently and Iʼm still grappling with it.

Hereʼs the set up:

My significant other and I have been going through a really tough time. I seem to lack the ability to effectively communicate my concerns and feelings to him, even when I take the time out to think and write them out and revise them.

I tried that a few nights ago. Plotted it out as best I could via text, but of course, it wasnʼt received well in his perspective.

In a phone call he slashed me down, saying I make everything a big ordeal even when itʼs not. When I again expressed exactly what was relayed in that text message, he cut me down with:

“If you are such a wordsmith, you should be able to word things better…”

It stung more then it should have. Enraged me, but I held it in knowing that, had I pointed it out, it would have escalated the entire conversation.

He, of all the people who know me, knows that my writing talent is the one of the few things I feel confident about. Without realizing it, he kicked me in my gut with such a pointed remark.

I can spin stories, arc narratives, enjamb lines of poetry, compose dialogue, pen thorough emails, concoct convincing copy….

But yea, it's hard for me to properly express my emotions, to convey them in ways that he will receive and not automatically jump to the conclusion that I am being a spiteful bitch.

Years of repressing one's emotions makes it a bit difficult to learn how to relay them.

I guess I am no wordsmith. Maybe I am just a hack with a keyboard.

But ya know, I can't believe that.

I don't do Snapchat, and I ain't on Twitter

I really don't care which celeb's on the shitter!

I am on Instagram, yep I admit it

But post one more lunch pic and I'm off this shit!

Facebook? Hell fucking no! I'd rather drink piss

There's got to be better things to do than this!

Alas, here on Prose, I've made a new home

Trails left from words, the only paths that I roam

A hundred reads on one poem, I might not see

Maybe there won't be hundreds following me

First place in a challenge, I may never reach

Then again,

Someone published writing from Cheech!

Mr. Yim's body no longer belonged to him. Against the pale pink walls of the convalescent home, his left arm jerked to and fro, a violent whip. Years before, Mr. Yim had been a school principal, but it was hard to imagine him as anything from his present vegetative state. In less than a decade, he had changed – no, he had disappeared, and in his place was this frail man in a wheelchair, a stranger. His neck deflated to one side as I slowly exited the room, an unintelligible murmur escaping from his jaw. No, Mr. Yim was gone.

Combine the cognitive decline of Alzheimer's, muscle spasms of ALS, and emotional irregularities of schizophrenia and you have a rough picture of Huntington's disease, a neurodegenerative disorder in which nerve cells in the brain accumulate toxins and die. The result is a progressive loss of control of both the body and mind, manifesting as involuntary writhing movements called chorea and deteriorating mental abilities. Typically, the first signs of illness appear around age thirty to forty, worsening until patients require full-time care. Some develop depression or unusual behaviors, a by-product of damage in multiple regions of the brain. Others gradually relinquish the ability to speak, no longer able to command their vocal cords. No matter the severity of symptoms, however, all Huntington's patients inevitably die from their disease.

Although less prevalent than cancers and less gruesome than Ebola, few disorders are as heartbreaking as Huntington's. In the hospital, I’ve watched it destroy not only the physical being of a person, but thoughts, memories, and personalities – the things that make us who we are. Losing a loved one is always painful, yet especially for Huntington's patients, death can be drawn out and humiliating. And while victims of the disease undoubtedly suffer, so do the caregivers. Children of parents with Huntington's have a 50% likelihood of inheriting the condition and may spend the rest of their lives in fear, reluctant to start a family of their own or plan a long-term career. With medical testing, those at risk can find out if they will have the disease, but because there is no cure, many prefer to not know. For these unlucky individuals, fate rests on a genetic coin flip. Half of them, free of Huntington's, will have the chance to lead normal lives. The other half, predestined, will endure the horrors of neurological degeneration.

Despite the dismal outcomes of Huntington's, I believe that there is light in the abyss. As an MD-PhD student, I've learned that the disease is caused by a mutation in a single gene, opening the possibility of repairing genetic material from patients through a process called gene therapy. There are still no treatments to stop or slow down the illness, but current research is promising. In particular, recent advances in genome editing and a technology known as site-specific nucleases could make it feasible to replace the faulty gene in Huntington's with a healthy variant, thereby eliminating the toxins potentially responsible for nerve cell death. While I have many years of clinical and graduate training remaining, I hope to one day pursue this topic as a physician-researcher and translate scientific progress on the disease into future medical care.

I stand for an end to Huntington's disease. I am only one person, but I will do everything in my power to promote awareness for patients, make new discoveries in the lab, and ultimately alleviate the suffering of individuals like Mr. Yim. Our generation is closer than ever to finding a cure. I know that we can make it happen.