Where Memories Go: Why dementia changes everything - Now with a new chapter by Sally Magnusson

Author:Sally Magnusson [Magnusson, Sally]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2014-01-29T23:00:00+00:00

*

You have been doing a series of psychiatric tests at a place they call the Memory Clinic, by which of course they mean the opposite.

When I bring you back for the results two weeks later I am amazed to hear you being asked, in a friendly way, how you found the tests. If you could remember the tests you took a fortnight ago you would be unlikely to have failed them so abysmally. There is no harm meant by it, but I wish someone here knew how you hate being stuck for an answer. It is the problem with the system. Nobody knows you at all.

The psychiatrist beckons us in. A small, kindly Asian doctor, she delivers your results: a total of 46 out of 105. ‘Severe mental impairment’ it says on the record sheet.

Interestingly, your scores for Language are relatively high. The doctor shows me the sentence you had written on the day of the test when asked to describe how you felt.

You had written: ‘This has been an awful experience, softened beautifully by a lovely lassie called Israela.’

‘We could tell from that that she had been a writer,’ says the doctor. Impressed by the language, she doesn’t appear to notice that you had found the tests ‘an awful experience’.

Your other scores are pathetically low. 0 out of 4 for Memory (Recent), 2 out of 9 for Calculation / Attention, 4 out of 17 for Memory (Learning), 3 out of 10 for Orientation, 3 out of 9 for Perception, 3 out of 8 for Abstract, 7 out of 12 for Praxis and 3 out of 6 for Memory (Remote). The 14 out of 20 for Language (Expression) and 7 out of 9 for Language (Comprehension) are by far the best.

I feel strangely humiliated on your behalf, hurt by the implicit assumption that these scores somehow sum you up, that you in your infinite variety and complexity can be reduced to marks out of 105.

As we leave, the psychiatrist turns to you. ‘Now, Mamie, do you have any questions?’

You do have one.

‘And what is it?’ the small lady smiles.

‘Can I ask where you learned your English?’

There is just a beat of a pause while the doctor collects herself before replying briskly that she was at school in India, where English was the medium of instruction. I doubt if she bothers much about political correctness in her line of work, although I shoot her an apologetic look, just in case. Still, good journalistic question, Mum.

What we do take away from the clinic is a full diagnosis at last. You have ‘mixed dementia’, a combination of Alzheimer’s disease with its busy plaques and tangles, and vascular dementia caused by reduced blood flow to the brain from a series of ‘silent strokes’, so small they often pass unnoticed. These have been confirmed by a brain scan showing areas of what the report calls ‘brain atrophy and vascular damage’.

So now we know.

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