Fox’s 24 Presents Good Example of CJD

NO SPOLERS! Don’t worry, 24 fans, I have your back!

This time around, I want to touch on four standout details from this episode of 24 while also sharing how each hit home with my own personal experience. I witnessed my mother’s death by CJD in the fall of 2004, nearly five years ago. I think it’s great that the show can raise awareness about CJD and all prion diseases. I also think, for the most part, that the show is staying true to what the experience of witnessing this disease is like for the characters. I think watching Jack Bauer experience his death by CJD seems to mostly be holding true to form–save for the fact that prion diseases don’t really kill in hours or days. I just wish the show would mention CJD by name more often just to raise awareness. However, I am glad they aren’t dropping the phrase “mad cow disease” so we can get away from that stigma. This has been done with class. Thank you, writers of 24.

I love Fox’s 24. I love Jack Bauer and I have watched every season of this show. I even was once so lucky as to interview Carlos Bernard in person at Universal Studios during the finale week of the second season of American Idol. I was star struck talking to the man who played 24’s Tony Almeida! I even slipped and called him ‘Tony’ in the interview instead of Carlos. I was so embarrassed when I played it back to edit it before it went on air. (And embarrassed once again when it ran on air!) If I remember right, I gushed like a nerd about the show in the interview too. Total fangirl. Just wanted to make it clear to you how much I love this TV show.

Because it’s getting hard to watch now.

It hurts now to watch 24. With this past episode (#18, air date April 13, 2009), my worst nightmare has been played out on a TV screen. I don’t need to go into detail and that’s out of respect to not offer a spoiler to those who haven’t gotten to their DVR’d shows this week yet. I have imagined this scenario as the worst possible thing that could happen and I feel completely naive saying this, but it freaks me out to no end that someone else has too–and is playing it out in a major TV show. Of course, anyone who has seen even one person die of CJD (any mutation) knows the frightening variables at play and how badly they could go wrong. Anyone who has witnessed this can dream up the worst case scenario. Reality check: I am not alone.

One thing that feels like a punch in the heart is seeing Jack Bauer understand what he is going through. He, unlike many CJD patients, knows and fully understands exactly what is happening to his body. It gave me chills when he told the doctor character that, “I feel like I’m losing some part of myself.” That is something the show hit dead on. I swear, whoever is writing this series knows what it is like to lose someone to CJD. Putting that line in there showed that to me; I don’t even think it’s possible I’m wrong about that. Someone wrote this show to bring attention to CJD and to avenge a loved one’s death. Bravo. If I’m wrong, I’ll eat my words. But I really doubt it.

Watching someone die of CJD is like watching everything that makes that person human being rapidly ripped away. You lose your ability to walk, speak, hold your bladder, remember things, and you get agitated. You lose your balance. You shake–it’s a symptom called myoclonus. Jack Bauer asks the doctor if there’s anything that can stop his memory loss like that drug she gave him to stop his shaking. She tells him there is not. That is very much like real life; there isn’t much medicine can do to stop the symptoms. Though when my mom got to Barrow Neurological Institute, they gave her some type of seizure drug that stopped the jerky muscle movements (mycolonus) and seizures she was having. But it isn’t like the slow train goodbye, a.k.a. Alzheimer’s Disease. At least with AD, you can administer memory enhancing drugs in the early stages. That is because AD is slow. But CJD is so fast, memory drugs are useless.

When Jack gets mad at Renee for calling Kim to come to the FBI and pulls her into a room to yell at her, I wonder if that was written in to show the breakdown of his personality as CJD takes hold. Becoming agitated is a symptom of CJD. My mother got extremely agitated very quickly as she was dying. She even got so mad once that she hurled a water bottle at my uncle–who also died of CJD last year. (For those just finding me, CURECJD.org, and this blog, my family carries the genetic mutation of CJD, called fCJD for ‘familial,’ mutation E200K).

The final thing I want to point out about this episode of 24 is how he gets done yelling at Renee, becomes calm, and then asks her to show him down the hall to where Kim is. I think this is because Jack is becoming disoriented and losing his confidence in being able to get around on his own. My mother was also like this, but her symptoms were much more obvious than Jack Bauer’s are so far. She would stay seated with a plastic bag in her office complaining of dizziness and nausea. She had no confidence in her ability to make it to the bathroom and vomit if she had to do so. She never did vomit because these were just neurological symptoms and not gastrointestinal. At the time we didn’t know the difference because we just thought she had multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s Disease, or early onset Alzheimer’s disease. We didn’t realize then that she had a fatal neurological disease and would be dead a month later.

I wish I could blog more about this today. I didn’t even touch on the idea of Kim donating stem cells to Jack. That will have to be for another blog because I’m out of time for today. Thank you for coming here and reading this. I hope you take what I’ve shared here into your heart and mind the next time you are watching 24. I hope as you watch that you realize this is a real disease that affects real people and that this is happening to families all over the world every single day. People of all ages die of CJD, all walks of life, all geographical locations–no one is immune. Thank you for reading this blog. Please comment and share if you would be so kind. My email address is below for those who aren’t brave enough to leave comments.

Heather Larson

hotwords [at] mac [dot] com