My parents - decline

[Frith2013]

Mid 70s, don’t smoke but sadly don’t do anything to look after their health. Mum is an alcoholic. Both quite “eccentric”, mum more so.

I was having a cup of tea with dad yesterday; he was under no particular pressure. He was looking at a bus timetable to work out what time my mum would be back (rural, so 2 buses a day and he’d drive the 3 miles to the bus stop to pick her up).

He read the timetable for ages, getting more agitated. In the end he said “How can the bus reach the village, before it’s left the city?”

I looked and there were 2 timetables, 1 “out” and 1 “return”. They were printed one above the other and dad would know every single town and village listed along the journey.

He’d been looking at the “out” timetable so obviously the village stop would come first. I couldn’t explain to him that he needed to look at the other timetable with the city at the top, the villages beneath.

This is not the first thing that has totally floored him. He has no learning difficulty or problem reading - he was an engineer.

It’s no good talking to mum about it.

What should I do or look out for?

This is very good, compares the signs of Alzheimers with normal age-related decline
www.alz.org/alzheimers-dementia/10_signs

My father is an engineer, now with "mild cognitive impairment". The problem solving has gone completely, in the sense of eg understanding how to start a sudoku - he still "solves problems" but in bizarre and inefficient ways - eg he wanted us to fasten his freestanding wardrobe to the wall so he could use the knob on the wardrobe door to pull himself out of bed without the wardrobe falling over. And, being an engineer, he is confident that he knows more than the rest of us about the problem, and he always tells you the details first, not what he's aiming at - "reach that cardboard box down ... look in the rd drawer down and you'll find some scissors ... now cut a circular hole in the bottom ... now find a G clamp under the sideboard..."

What should you do? Try to persuade him to have a memory assessment, but that will be hard, so don't pin your hopes on that. Meanwhile, help him by making information clear. Write out a bus timetable for him with just the critical bits on - village, city, times. Anything you tell him, be prepared to write it down too - eg "I'll see you next Tuesday" - write it on the calendar too.