Brownsville woman reflects on husband's challenges as he combats rare brain disorder
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A Brownsville woman is sharing her husband's story.
Navy veteran, U.S. Border Patrol agent, ATF special agent and a private investigator, those are all titles held by Gerlad Plot.
But there is one more that he earned more than a decade ago.
"We've been married 14 years. We connected over the love of animals," Plot's wife Jeissa Melendez said.
She says her husband was always a healthy man.
"He was a person that would do his six-month check-up," Melendez said. "He's never had an illness, nothing. He always just joked like, they just told me I'm fat."
In March, at 60-years-old, Plot began showing concerning symptoms.
"He started having a little bit of shaking in his hands and a little bit clumsy," Melendez said.
She says she made an appointment with Veterans Affairs, but before they could go, Plot's symptoms began to worsen.
"He called me, and he said, 'Jeissa, I didn't want to tell you, but I resigned from my job' and I said why, and he said 'I'm doing my investigations but as soon as I get home I don't remember anything'," Melendez said.
Plot began experiencing hallucinations, delusions and was losing the ability to walk. On April 17, Melendez got the news that her husband had Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.
"And I said, what does this mean? What are we going to do moving forward? And he said there's no treatment, no, no cure. We just need to keep him comfortable," Melendez said.
Plot and Melendez were told he only had a few months left to live.
CJD is a rare brain disorder. It happens when a protein in the brain begins to multiply, leading it to infect brain tissue.
"That's why it's so peculiar and different disease that pretty much everything is we've studied in neurology," McAllen Neurologist Dr. Daniel Sa said.
The disease affects one in one million people in the world.
Dr. Sa didn't work with Plot, but in his 20 years in the medical field, he's seen about six cases of CJD, none in the Rio Grande Valley.
"You'll stop talking, stop walking, stop being able to feed yourself and unfortunately in 100 percent of the proven cases it's fatal," Dr. Sa said.
Plot is receiving care at a nursing home in Brownsville. Melendez stays by his side most days.
"It's just him and I," Melendez said. "He always said I'm his ride or die, and knowing that I'm going to lose him to a rare disease is difficult."
Melendez says she hopes her husband's story can create awareness on this disease and its effects on not only patients, but their families.
Once Plot passes, Melendez will fulfill his final request, bringing her husband back to his home country in Puerto Rico, along with an urn decorated in his favorite football team, the Miami Dolphins.
Watch the video above for the full story.
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