Meghan

Police suspected a case of public drunkenness when they responded to reports of a girl stumbling down Old Westford Road, but finding nothing in Meghan Sullivan’s pink backpack, they went on their way.

She followed them back to the station. Her sister by her side, she asked the startled officers if she could have a word. Holding up her wrist, she revealed a slender silver medical bracelet. The word: Huntington’s.

One officer remembered a Lowell police captain who had died from the disease the year before, leaving behind a wife and two children. Meghan nodded.

“He was my dad,” she said.

A degenerative neural disease with no known cure, Huntington’s attacks your balance and speech and eventually cripples you, Meghan explained. Her father John was diagnosed when she was 2 and she grew up knowing there was a 50 percent chance she would develop the disease herself.

Meghan asked officers to understand one more thing.

“I’m not going to stop walking,” she said.