Support is now available!!!
Following my slightly distraught phone call to the memory clinic on Monday we had a home visit from a member of the team yesterday (24 hrs later). Apparently we had slipped through the net so it really is lucky that I'm fairly resourceful, reasonably capable, have a great support network and had been pointed in the direction of Contented Dementia www.contenteddementiatrust.org/and Young Dementia UK www.youngdementiauk.org. Anyway we now have a name and contact number if we need any help which is rarely a bad thing. The purpose of the visit was to get Ash to do a short test involving 30 specific questions some of which needed written answers and then he answered questions about his well-being. Some of you reading this will have already been through something similar and it certainly brought back memories of previous visits to the clinic especially the one where Ash got so many questions wrong and was so confused that it prompted that fateful diagnosis. That was 14 months ago. Yesterday he was so much better than that awful day in December 2017 that I beamed almost the whole time. He certainly didn't get everything right but he wasn't fazed by the visit and on the whole did very well indeed. She was especially impressed by his answers to her well-being questions because he was so positive about his life and how he felt in relation to the dementia. She took note of all the things we have in place to lessen any confusion he might feel and said that they were obviously working which made me very happy and so we ended the visit on an optimistic note and a feeling that all the hard work over the past months has been worth it. If you are in a similar situation and wondering whether you have the stamina to follow those strategies with dogged determination yesterday's visit proved to me that it was totally the right way to go. I know it shouldn't take an outsider to validate my feelings but sometimes it's such a help and especially when it's a professional who sees people in our situation on a regular basis and so knows what to look for.
memoryfortwo@gmail.com
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