A Few Bad Genes

When I talk about a few bad genes, I'm not talking about Uncle Gene. In my last post, I mentioned Uncle John's migraines, an affliction that followed me and both of my sons. A family blog might actually be useful for mentioning these things, to warn the younger generation of disorders to watch for. So here's what I know.
     We know about the migraines. Uncle John, me, my sons--others?
      From Sofia, we have a risk of muscular dystrophy of the pelvic girdle muscles. That's what made Sofia limp, then Vake, and now Mark. It shows up in one's middle ages, or later. With exercise, the muscles don't develop, they atrophy.
      The family seems susceptible to auto-immune disorders.  Pappy (Eli) had psoriasis. Uncle Gene and Uncle John had such arthritis that they had their hip joints replace. Gene got too lively on his crutches once or twice, and threw himself off onto his back.  John's replacements were so early in the availability of that technology that he actually wore out his first fake hips, and had to submit to surgery for a second round. But the arthritis bent his spine into a question mark in his older age.  I remember shopping for shoes with Aunt Sylvia, but she rejected pair after pair, because they hurt the arthritic joints of her feet.  (Cousin Eric Sampson could probably help with that; he sells shoes, especially  to people with disabilities.) My dad, Vake, had lupus.
     Personally,today,  my guts hurt.  I have lymphocytic colitis. A friend sent me a stack of medical investigations half a foot high, and I read them. They all describe the disorder--you have an accumulation of white blood cells at the base of the epithelial cells of the gut. Not a one does more than describe.  It's not know if it's autoimmune.
     Then there's the OCD. My son Brook admits to it.  We used to tease him by seeing how long it would take him to straighten out the wall art in our house, that we purposely tipped off-sides when we knew he was about to visit.  He took to doing a walk-through as soon as he arrived.  When we gave him a set of good kitchen knives, he bought a knife block for them, but it had spaces for steak knives that he didn't own. He didn't need them--he rarely eats steak.  But he couldn't find steak knives to fill up the block that matched, so one by one, he accumulated an  expensive set of matching  knives to fill up a whole block, including steak knives, and sent the original set to his brother.  "It was totally obsessive, I know," he admitted.
     But he's not alone. David admits to handing his shirts on hangars that are color-coded to his shirts.  If he doesn't have enough hangars to load all the color-coordinated shirts, he hangs the shirts on off-color hangars.  But as soon as a hangar becomes available, he switches an unmatched shirt to a hangar that matches.
     At least the OCD seems harmless.