ELK GROVE — The Elk Grove community is remembering the life of longtime local sports journalist John Hull.
John died a month before his 70th birthday at the beginning of September after he was diagnosed with a rare form of dementia.
“He built people up around him because he wanted to know what you had to say,” John’s wife, Marcia Hull, said.
John spent decades telling other people’s stories, and now it is his loved ones turns to tell his.
“He had little songs and phrases for everything,” Sylvia Osorno, John’s daughter, said. “It just happened so fast.”
Sylvia told me that her father started to experience neuropathy in his legs and feet in March. Countless doctor visits couldn’t give a clear answer as to why his health was declining so quickly.
“In the last couple weeks of John’s life, suffering from this disease, he wasn’t the person we knew,” Marcia said.
It was not until the last two weeks of his life that John got the diagnosis: Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare form of rapidly progressing dementia caused by abnormal proteins called prions.