Producer Rome Hartman and Bill Whitaker discussed their story on what they call the cruelest disease you've never heard of.

I had never heard of FTD frontotemporal dementia.

I had never heard of it either.

In what way did you see the cruelty of this disease?

It hits people in the prime of their lives.

It hits families in their prime.

It makes you do strange, strange things.

You might go over to a table in a restaurant and take the food off of a stranger's plate.

Um, you say totally inappropriate things and before you know it, you're living in this upside down world.

The other cruelty is that there's currently no treatment and there's nothing that can be done and the outcome is always death.

There's much hopeful research going on.

But at the moment um, there's nothing that can be done.

There's nothing.

And uh, we're talking primarily about the behavioral variant but with the speech variant that we saw with Tracey lind, the cruelty there is that it's taking away the part of her that makes her who she is and before the onset of FTD language and speech came easily and naturally to you.

Oh yeah, yeah.

I mean, you know my, my whole life was about language so they said where we can go if you guys are ready, we see a walk and talk that you tried to film with Tracey and Emily and she struggled.

She struggled quite a bit.

Is it difficult for you to be out here with the traffic and people and we were on a street corner in san Francisco.

It was just a horrible confluence of events, the wind picked up, knocked over a sign a bus pulled up and made a loud breaking noise.

It's the lights and it's the sound.

All of this was going on at the time that she was trying to cross the street and she panicked too much aside from being shocked at how devastating this disease is.

I was most impressed with the caregivers.

How are you doing?

I brought, I brought a friend of mine and I told him they need to bring the big camera bill.

How are you?

Very nice to meet you.

You interview Mark johnson at the nursing facility and you saw close up what this disease has done to him.

You understand why you're here?

No, I think you'd be okay at home.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was very difficult.

Sad as she told us about her visits.

They have four kids for very young kids take your backpack off honey.

He'll kiss the kids Then after just a couple of minutes he's done.

He wants them to leave.

He did that with you the same by I don't want to make you uncomfortable.

Okay.

I see you okay.

Okay.

See markets real nice to meet you can go lay in bed in the middle and I talked to Amy a lot about that in the days and weeks leading up to it and whether to interview Mark.

Well we knew it wasn't going to be an interview.

It was an encounter.

I mean because he's not really there to be interviewed, but I think she felt that it was important If the idea is to raise awareness of this disease, you sort of have to see somebody in the throes of it.

The cameraman and sound man came out shaken and it is hard to watch.

It's hard to watch.

These women in our piece are selfless and determined and you know, they get knocked down, they get back up and so full of love, so caring.

It's really hard.

It's hard to manage it.

I wish I could be here all the time and I can't be.

So you you have a partner who is no longer a partner.

Amy for one is so compassionate and so involved and so determined to give him everything she has that she'll never give up on him.

Thank you.