Day 24: Dementia Awareness Month 2014
The article ‘My mum has dementia’ by Annette Dasey was published on news.com.au on September 14, and I am highlighting it following the media release from yesterday about the impact of younger onset dementia on our children. Please follow the link and read the whole story.
IN 2012, Pilates instructor Louise Palmer started to become confused about tasks she had previously undertaken with ease.
In May 2013, at age 54, she was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), which is the second most common form of younger-onset dementia, after Alzheimer’s disease.
Frontotemporal dementia causes a severe degeneration of brain cells in the frontal or temporal lobes that leads to symptoms including personality changes, loss of communication skills and alterations to social behaviour.
Here, her daughter Riley, 25, talks about slowly losing her mother to the disease.
“Mum used to be a supermum. Energetic, vivacious and sporty, she loved to socialise. She was incredibly independent and fiercely stubborn and could make everything OK, like in primary school, when I was drawing a border on my Egypt assignment and a flood of gold ink oozed out. I was distraught, but my creative mother turned the mess into a pharaoh’s head.” Read more here…
By your comments, your Mum sounds like a woman who was once and still is a wonderful woman. We all lose things as we age. Dementia is an accellerator. Many of the treasures given by those of us with Dementia are hidden by our times of silence. You experience much loss from a person who no longer communicates as she used to. But my guess is that she still loves you in very deap ways which are not expressable.
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Hi George.. it is not my mum, but an article by a younger person whose mum has dementia. Cheers, Kate
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