When the woman who had nursed him back to health began showing signs of Huntington's disease, Brian Verity became angry with her and sorry for himself. That's not the way it's meant to be. The terrifying fact is this: Huntington's disease leads to physical and mental deterioration. There is no cure. It is handed down genetically, with a 1:2 chance of inheritance that cannot be determined until the disease shows itself, often not until the sufferer is in their 40s. Many do not know they have the gene or are at risk of passing it on. Those who do know, because a parent has suffered from it, may wait a lifetime before finding out whether they are safe or not. The prospects are horrific. After his first marriage failed, Brian Verity had a breakdown and married the woman who nursed him back to health. Within a few years, she began showing the signs of Huntington's that he had seen in other members of her family and that he had a morbid fear of. Having fallen in love with her in hospital, he now found himself repelled, fearful of his own psychological fragility and inability to cope and yet committed to protecting her from the terrible distress that lay in wait. In his view, assisted dying was her only option. Was he right? Stephen Games, who edited this book, was in contact with Brian Verity in the year before he died, and is available to talk about the raw issues raised by the author and about the wider context of the book. AUTHOR: Brian Verity lived through the trauma of finding he had married into a family whose members all carried the gene for Huntington's disease and who suffered accordingly-as he did, for other reasons. It became his mission to mitigate the consequences of their condition and educate the public about its horrors. Following his wife's suicide, he was questioned at length by the police and kept under surveillance for a year. He went on to campaign for voluntary euthanasia. He died in 2019.
