The handwritten lines were twisted in the order book of Rogelio Antelo, a native of Corcubión (A Coruña) and a butcher in the neighboring town of Cee. The words danced in his notes and sometimes he didn't even understand their lyrics. “I also felt that I spoke badly, with a strange sensation in my tongue. As if I had worms in my mouth,” he says. I didn't know it yet, but they were the first symptoms of many. Like that time he was leaving to deliver an order at a bar and he fell on the street, just like that. He even looked around in case anyone had seen him and thought he was drunk. But he didn't drink, nor had he ever had such bad handwriting. “I didn't know what, but something was happening to me,” explains the 57-year-old man. It took him five years to name those fallen lines: he suffered SCA36, a rare hereditary ataxia discovered in the Costa da Morte regions of A Coruña and that affects balance, speech and hearing. There are less than 500 cases in the world, about 150 in this part of Galicia alone.
