Welcome back to the peripheral. Have you ever felt like you live a cursed life or that your family has had a curse leveled upon them?

Today I speak with Janet, who has suffered multiple tragic losses within her family. And with all the loss she's endured and health issues she's experienced, Janet assumed

she or anyone within her vicinity would suffer some terrible fate. We all think lightning can't

strike twice, but what if it does? My name is Janet, and the purpose for me being here today is we have a condition in my

family that is called RYR2. It's a gene mutation, but this all started really for me when I was

11 years old. My family consisted of my mom and dad. We all lived in the same house.

My sister, Diane, was 11 years older than I was, so she was 22. My eldest brother is 10 years

older than I am, and my middle brother is seven years older than I am. So there's quite a bit of an

age gap between all of us.

My sister, Diane, had a four-year-old daughter at the time, and she was attending Northern

Michigan University, which is in Upper Michigan in Marquette. My sister was living in an apartment

with her daughter on her own at that point in time.

She was, Diane was absolutely smart.

She was so, so, so smart.

And the way that she was, you know, as an 11-year-old child looking at her, I just, I thought, wow, she's everything that I want to be.

She was the reason I started smoking cigarettes when I was younger, because when I was a kid,

I remember her blowing cigarette smoke into a bubble, and you could just see the swirl of the

cigarette smoke going around in

the bubble and it just looked so, so fascinating to an 11-year-old kid. And I mean, she had all

these books that were just amazingly huge. She was studying Spanish in addition to English at the,

at the college. and she was on the

Dean's list at NMU she when placed in a poetry competition at NMU I mean she was just she was fabulous

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