DEAD IN BED By Bailey Simms: The Complete Second Book

PART 9, AUTHOR'S NOTE - 2/8/15, 6:52pm

Okay. So I've realized after that last post that I've written virtually nothing about my medical condition. Which I guess is in keeping with my family's tradition—by this I mean pretty much my dad's tradition—of not ever talking about the fact that I have Huntington's disease.

There. I've written it, and now it's on Wattpad. So now everyone knows. Yay.

I've always known that I probably wouldn't make it past twenty-five years old or so. That has always just been a fact of my life. And, honestly, throughout most of my childhood I never really felt that different from anyone else. None of my symptoms had appeared yet, and for the bulk of my life, twenty-five years old has seemed like part of a strange and distant future. I mean, think about it. You know you'll probably keel over sometime in your seventies or eighties. When you're only, say, thirteen, and twenty-five is still half a lifetime away, things don't feel all that different.

Still, I've always known that I have what's designated specifically as "juvenile" Huntington's, which means I'm one of the lucky few lottery winners who gets to start experiencing symptoms as a teen. I've always known that my muscles are going to slowly stiffen, that my movements are going to become so shaky that eventually I won't be able to walk, and that at some point I'll lose the ability to speak—and even swallow, complications from which will most likely be what does me in. I've always known that I got Huntington's from my mom, and that she died from it when I was three, having known that she'd unwittingly passed the gene on to me, her only child.

What my mom didn't now, thankfully, is what I've learned more recently. I guess I have an unusual form of the disease. This means, for one thing, that I can't ever get pregnant—not like that was ever going to happen anyway—and, also, that actually reaching even twenty-five will be stretching it. Or so my doctor tells me, anyway. His best estimate has shrunk down to twenty-two. But even that he can't be sure about. There's a chance I could die at twenty, he admitted, or even at seventeen. It's hard to say for certain because apparently nobody has yet set eyes on the wonder of biology that is my particular form of Huntington's. So there's that.

But, wait, there's more!

You didn't think this was all the crappy news I had for you, did you? Oh, no, dear Wattpadians. There's, much, much more.

Here's where you get to learn that despite my being a walking medical tragedy, I'm actually a horrible person. All the pity points in the world won't ever make up for what I'm about to tell you.

I haven't told Kyle any of this.

He doesn't know that I'm going to be gone soon. I've been lying to him that my meds are for this lingering Lyme disease that requires a few years' worth of medication before it's cleared up.

And I've had absolutely no idea how I'm finally going to tell him the truth.

See? Worst person in the world. Hands down. I mean, really. Who would do something like that to their boyfriend? Especially a boyfriend like Kyle?