A Weekend with the nutters

My wife and I have a problem shared with millions of people up and down the country: dealing with the Alzheimer's epidemic. The following account is typical of little dramas playing out throughout the developed world.

Yesterday I went to see my father-in-law,who is now living an OPH specialising in EMI (Elderly Mentally Infirm). He shares his new home with 30 other, more or less similarly disabled EMI cases. Some appear to be "high functioning" and can carry on apparently rational conversations, though they tend to break down on more detailed questioning. Others are much worse: one old lady wanders the rooms constantly, whimpering quietly to herself whilst hugging a grimy plastic dolly. On this occasion I could find no good reason not to walk him the 400 metres back to our house for a cup of coffee. We know he is likely to empty his bladder at any moment, and keep a careful watch on him for suspicious signs of imminent urination. But I was not in time to prevent him hawking up a gobbet of phlegm and launching it on to a rather fine Indian silk rug in our living room. Instinctively I remonstrated with him, reminding him thatit is not customary to spit on the cartpet in someone's home. And my first, rather uncharitable thought was, well, I shan't be inviting you back home again any time soon.

Then in the afternoon I received a call from my mum's carers, who found her nauseous and faint. This is a classical behaviour mode of hers every time she is worried about anything; this time I think it is her upcoming  visit to London where she will spend Xmas with my brother. Or it could be the antibiotics she was given the other day for a urinary infection. Whatever. Anyway, we drove the 30 miles to her place and found an anti- nausea drug in one of her drawers and persuaded her to take it As usual it worked fairly quickly. While we were there we found that her upstairs toilet seat had broken, this despite the fact that I replaced thesame seat only a few months ago. What is she doing? One thing is for sure: she can't tell us. Although she is perhaps 2 years behind my FiL in terms of memory loss and is still (just) able to live at home independently (though requiring a care package to enable that), she is still completely unable to account for what happened five minutes ago.

The fact is that if one you lose your short term memory, your life is shattered. And throughout the world, more and more people are living long enough for this disaster to befall. It could happen to you. It could happen to me. And don't think being intelligent to start with, or doing lots of "brain training" is going to help you. All you can hope is that you stay lucky. Good luck with that.