Parents/relatives with dementia.

jjbomber

Well-known member
Yes, my father-in-law. He's 92, but he keeps climbing up on the roof to check the tiles. He gets up in the middle of the night to make himself a meal out of dog food. He turns all the taps on in the middle of the night and keeps flooding out his home. Many, many more.
 
Yes, my father-in-law. He's 92, but he keeps climbing up on the roof to check the tiles. He gets up in the middle of the night to make himself a meal out of dog food. He turns all the taps on in the middle of the night and keeps flooding out his home. Many, many more.
Sorry to hear that - he's obviously further along than my dad, but he's literally just turned 80 so I suppose that's no surprise.

Being 'early stage', he's mostly showing through an almost complete inability to form new memories, but he's also starting to become apathetic - hardly ever leaves the house. We'd tried to get him to go out with his extended family for a meal and a couple of pints for his 80th and he'd been amenable, but changed his mind and got fed up/upset with my brother.

He'd been on at us for ages to get rid of his car - when we finally did so, he accused us of wrong-doing and told his next door neighbour that we'd nicked it. The bill of sale he signed is now stuck to the front of the fridge. Apparently, thinking your family is stealing from you is a common delusion in the later stages. Happy days, eh?
 

WayneKerr

Well-known member
Brother-in-law has vascular dementia and is in a bad way. An astute businessman and a health-conscious sporty guy - director of a company and run several London marathons, etc. There's a saying with this that you lose them twice, once to the condition and when they finally go. Not nice to witness this kind of demise.
 
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jjbomber

Well-known member
Sorry to hear that - he's obviously further along than my dad, but he's literally just turned 80 so I suppose that's no surprise.
yes, but he's 92. My friend's parents have dementia. The nurses turned up to take samples, but they wouldn't let them in. They left the containers and said they'd pick them up the next day. When they went round the next day, my friend's father was adamant that they hadn't called the day before and he didn't have any specimen jars at all.

There are 4 stages of dementia apparently, and only stage 4 is the fatal one. I tell my wife to shoot me when I get to that stage.
 

Gray

Well-known member
Auntie developed vascular dementia.
Multiple times I had to break it to her that her sister (my Mum) had died.
Each time was the 'first time' I'd told her and she burst into tears.
"Why didn't someone tell me?" "You've been hiding it from me", she used to say.
(When fully well, a few years earlier, Auntie had attended Mum's funeral).

Sure is a terrible, all too common condition.
 
My brother's just found a handwritten note accusing us of 'removing' the car, which stops him seeing his special friends (there aren't any), running his business (it was wound up more than a decade ago) and that he's just waiting to die as he hasn't got a car (I fear that this may actually be true). It ends with a single capitalised word meaning illegitimate in the plural.

Can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to seeing him next...
 
My brother's just found a handwritten note accusing us of 'removing' the car, which stops him seeing his special friends (there aren't any), running his business (it was wound up more than a decade ago) and that he's just waiting to die as he hasn't got a car (I fear that this may actually be true). It ends with a single capitalised word meaning illegitimate in the plural.

Can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to seeing him next...
Ouch!
 
It's a dreadful condition. My dad had Dementia. So unpredictable it was hard to fully grasp -- it was back in the late 90s.

He was banned from our London supermarket for pinching bars of chocolate. He would also wander off up the road. The final straw came when a Bailiff punched him. He wasn't paying the rent and the Bailiff used him as a punch bag. It turned out the Bailiff was a 30-year old ex-firefighter.

We buried my dad 14-days before my daughter was born.

And now my sister is placed in a nursing home.

So I feel for anyone who has family members with this horrible condition.
 
When dad got his diagnosis, I read that there seemed to be a tentative link between vitamin b12 and lower incidence of dementia - just read in Science Focus about the results of a three-year study using (obvs) double-blind conditions, and after three years there was an easily-measured difference between placebo and non-placebo groups. I started on multivitamins after I first read about it, and given that they cost peanuts (and that my diet, whilst good, is pretty narrow) I'm glad I did. Might be worth considering if you don't, as we are all not exactly in the first flush of youth.

(Usual caveats about making sure you exercise, use your brain, keep socially-active, have a decent diet etc. I take the view that anything which lengthens the odds of me ending up like my dad is worth doing. I know none of this gives me any sort of guarantee...)
 
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When dad got his diagnosis, I read that there seemed to be a tentative link between vitamin b12 and lower incidence of dementia - just read in Science Focus about the results of a three-year study using (obvs) double-blind conditions, and after three years there was an easily-measured difference between placebo and non-placebo groups. I started on multivitamins after I first read about it, and given that they cost peanuts (and that my diet, whilst good, is pretty narrow) I'm glad I did. Might be worth considering if you don't, as we are all not exactly in the first flush of youth.

(Usual caveats about making sure you exercise, use your brain, keep socially-active, have a decent diet etc. I take the view that anything which lengthens the odds of me ending up like my dad is worth doing. I know none of this gives me any sort of guarantee...)
I think what you say about deficiencies in diet and lifestyle has a lot to do with this horrible condition.

My school mate's ex-wife's parents lived in Spain for many years (well over 10 years) and the locals never mentioned anything about conditions such as these. We can only put this down to diet and stress free lifestyle.

Even though I don't condone smoking, the Spanish are among some of heaviest smokers in Europe yet have so few cases of lung conditions.
 

PAPA BOO

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It's odd but you need to watch and know what to look for. My mom had some medical conditions I did not know about. That's what you need to understand so their life as they go into Dementia can be better understood. It's really hard, I don't know how the workers can do it. Many were very helpful, others not so good. I do understand diet and vitamins I take many. But my father lived until he was in his 80s and lived on coffee and cigarettes his whole life. His family was from a diet religion group and he lived longer than all of them and some did suffer from this issue but he did not he died from emphysema but did not have Dementia strange.
 

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