The choice of memory issues as the name for this Blog has ironic connotations for several reasons. Some time ago I began to have concerns about my wife’s ability to do things that had always been well within her capacity. She began to mislay things with increasing frequency and she didn’t seem her normal self. It also became difficult to hold rational conversations with her. There were several other tensions in our life and at first I just put it down to a bad patch in our marriage.
When I raised my concerns with family members it soon became clear that they did not share my point of view. I raised the matter with our G P and he felt impotent to deal with my concerns unless M was prepared to raise the matter herself. This was a ‘no go area’: as as soon as I mentioned my concerns anger was M’s response and recriminations usually followed. Stroke became the game changer with M’s memory issues.
M made a very good recovery from stroke with 50% peripheral vision loss being the obvious marker. Her confidence was obviously shattered with a near death experience. Discharge from the Stroke Ward of our local hospital into the Independent Care Facility was prompt. She felt her way around the walls of the ICF for over a month before we arrived at the Multi Disciplinary Meeting to discuss going home. One of the conclusions of the meeting was that the Clinical Psychologist from the Stroke team would conduct Memory Tests to consider concerns that had been raised with M’s doctor the day before stroke.
Some weeks later the C P asked to see me in private to alert me to the results of her tests: mixed dementia; Alzheimer’s Disease and Vascular Dementia. It was one of those occasions where you hate to have your opinions about your wife’s health confirmed. The C P advised me that an earlier diagnosis from the Memory Service of Mild Cognitive Impairment with Vascular Changes was a holding position because of the proximity of stroke. Later testing by the Memory Service resulted in a diagnosis of vascular dementia.
I realise that this may be confusing to the reader and I have to confess that I have got lost on our journey. This became evident yesterday when our G P mentioned, in passing, that M was suffering from mixed dementia. Perhaps I have been on am mission of escapism: accepting without question that the diagnosis of the Memory Service of vascular dementia was definitive. The ploy of using memory issues in relation to this Blog is because the Memory Service prefer to use this phrase rather than dementia. I will return to this issue later when I focus on our experience of Memory Service.
