There are occasions when my wife goes off for a walk and I am not sure where she has gone.  My initial reaction when this first happened was panic.  I became anxious when she had been gone for some time and followed advice to call the police. Their arrival coincided with hers and caused great amusement.  A few weeks later when she had been missing for quite some time they managed to find her a few streets away on her way back home.

My anxieties about her being out on her own stem from two sources.  Dementia means that she appears to wander, rather than walk, and has no particular route in mind.  She finds her way back home by asking people to direct her to our particular Drive.  Secondly, with 50% loss of peripheral vision mistakes are possible and accidents could happen.  Yet walking is one of the things her G P has advised her to do, as part of stroke recovery, and she retains and enthusiasm to take his advice.

Although we frequently go out walking together M likes to go off on her own and sometimes tells me she is going for a stroll.  On other occasions I find her missing and  realise she has taken herself off for a stroll.  Additional safety measures we tried with CareLink proved more trouble than they were worth and M refused to use a tracking device.  So I decided to set up an informal Neighbourhood Watch Scheme and yesterday my efforts in this direction paid off.

Yesterday afternoon I sat at my P C posting on my Blog confident that M was in the garden.  When I finished my musing I found she had taken herself off for a walk.  One of my neighbours was watering her garden and had not seen M pass by.  Shortly afterwards a friendly dog walker from a couple of streets away gave me the nod: ‘hey mate I have just seen your wife…’  As I travelled in the car to pick her up another neighbour flagged me down in his car and said: ‘I’ve just been following your wife and redirected her this way’.  Sure enough a few minutes later I hailed her and she jumped in beside me.  It gets even better than that, but more on how the evening went later.

Any reader of this post might frown and say you are taking silly risks.  Maybe my luck is in at the moment: only time will tell.  Locking the doors and throwing away the key might be a safer option.  My question would be what would that do to the morale of a highly intelligent woman who has always been fiercely independent?   Dementia may be robbing my wife of many of her attributes but I am not inclined to take away any more of her independence at this moment in time: particularly with Neighbourhood Watch on call.