started acting strangely<\/a>. Mum occasionally forgot where the bathroom was, or would walk out of the door and get lost on the front path of a home she\u2019d lived in for 52 years.<\/p>\nSince, at that point, I lived just up the road in Bedfordshire, I spent a lot of time at my parents\u2019, and often stayed the night. The first time I knew anything was up with Dad was when he came into my room, where I was lying in bed, urinated in the corner of the room, and then left, as if nothing had happened.<\/p>\n
We eventually took Dad to the memory clinic, where he was diagnosed with vascular dementia. But Mum\u2019s diagnosis of Lewy body dementia wasn\u2019t made until 2023, the following year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Dad became increasingly forgetful, though to the end, he always remembered who I was. Mum had forgotten who I was in 2022 \u2013 you know that day is coming but it breaks your heart when it arrives.<\/p>\n
Dad regressed to being a child. One evening, he put a plastic kettle on the gas hob, thinking it was a metal one from the 1940s. The kitchen caught fire and we had to call the fire brigade.<\/p>\n
By now I had hired a private carer, Becky, who was to become a lifeline: Becky would cook meals for my parents during the week, and do the cleaning. My whole life became a spreadsheet as I worked out how I\u2019d afford it, based on how many years my parents might live. This kept me awake at night: Mum and Dad had saved hard all their lives and the money was going so fast. In the end we were spending \u00a314,000 a month on two carers 24\/7 to care for both of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mum and Dad were grafters who worked hard their whole lives, having met at Coppermill telephone exchange in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":695960,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[53881,915,13888,2989,854,59,102,2281,1906,20558,5438,58919,56,54,55,157732],"class_list":["post-695959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-aged-care","tag-alzheimers-disease","tag-conditions","tag-death","tag-dementia","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-health-and-fitness","tag-mental-health","tag-social-care","tag-standard","tag-top-story","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-us-content"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=695959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695959\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/695960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=695959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=695959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=695959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}