Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease

It rarely begins dramatically. A forgetting that cannot be explained. A word that no longer comes. A familiar path that suddenly feels foreign, though you have walked it a hundred times. Then comes the unsteadiness while walking, the twitching of limbs, the fear in the eyes of people who have known you for a long time. Within a few months, everything transforms. What a person ordinarily does — think, remember, organise, understand — disintegrates at a speed that overwhelms both those affected and those who love them.