On a random October day in 2023, my dad’s brain just stopped working. A year later, he was gone — taken by a disease so rare that most doctors never see a single case: Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.

If you’ve never heard of Creutzfeldt-Jakob, I can’t fault you. I hadn’t heard of it either until I started panic-googling my dad’s symptoms — hallucinations, ataxia, dystonia, confusion — and saw it listed as the absolute worst-case scenario. That nightmare came true several months later when doctors at Duke University gently delivered the prognosis.

My mom and I were shattered. My dad, already slipping into dementia, simply asked, “Will I still be able to play football?” Dad knew he was the patient — he just didn’t know what for.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease is a rare, fatal brain disorder caused by misfolded proteins called prions. A prion disease you may be more familiar with is Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, commonly referred to as “Mad Cow........

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