ON MONDAY: Could photos of my girls on family holidays save my memory?

carpet, I’m now crunching yellow Post-it notes between my toes. The pile has grown thicker after another restless night of waking, turning, remembering something else I’ll need for the next day.

I glance at my alarm clock: 4.50am, the same time I’ve been waking for work for years, ready and out the door for the first bus at 5.35am.

I bend over and unpeel a few Post-Its from under my heels; by the time I look up again, it is 5 am. Ten minutes lost. How did that happen? I need to move, but I can’t think what I do first. Dress? Eat? Shower?

At work I turn on my computer and the log- in screen flashes up. I stare at it for a second longer than I know I should, wondering what it’s asking from me.

I’ve still managed to arrive at my desk an hour earlier than everyone else. I used to use the time in a deserted office to get ahead for the day, but now I pull the pile of sticky notes from my handbag and work through them one by one.

Then I screw each one into a tiny ball when I’m done and bury it in the bottom of the wastepaper bin.

There are days when the fog feels heavier than others. On those days, I dread the knock on my office door, a head peering round the corner, or a body appearing beside my desk with a question.

I know that there will be a blank written large across my face. I know that I’ll try to distract them from it, shuffling papers on my desk, making an excuse that I need to be somewhere else.

Answering the phone on days like that has become more and more difficult.

A sister on the ward phones me and I don’t know who she is. I buy time, ask her to come to my office. When she does, I realise that we’re friends.

‘I thought I’d done something to offend you!’ she said. And I laugh it off, blaming a busy day.

June 2014

AnOTHEr six months have gone by. I’m sitting in front of Jo, my clinical psychologist, again as she tells me the three words she wants me to remember by the end of the session.

She starts going through the same memory tests as before. But when she asks me to name objects beginning with a certain letter, nothing comes. She asks me to draw a clock. I don’t know where to start.

It is obvious to both of us that there’s been a decline. Fear is gathering in the pit of my stomach.

Then she asks for those three words she’d told me at the beginning of the session — and again, they’ve slipped away.

Over the next two weeks, I do more memory tests. They don’t go well.

‘What do you think it could be?’ I ask finally.

She looks into my eyes, and her voice is calm and steady.

‘Possibly dementia, but I cannot be completely sure, not until we get the results of all the tests.’

‘Of course,’ I reply. But a numbness embraces me, and a sadness, too — a feeling that this is the end because that’s all I know about dementia: the blank stares, the helplessness, the confusion.

Back home, I search YouTube for ‘dementia’.

The videos that appear on screen are exactly the images that my mind has been conjuring up: men and women at the end of their lives, old and white-haired, confined to hospital beds, blankness written large across every face. none of these people are like me.

My eyes skip through those videos, searching for something else, and that’s when I find Keith Oliver. When the video starts, I’m relieved to see an intelligent man of about my age, sitting in a chair at home, speaking lucidly and eloquently.

I’m transfixed as he starts to tell his story: how he was the headteacher of a busy Canterbury school, how two years before the recording he started to have unexpected falls, a feeling of fatigue, and of just feeling ‘unwell’.

Like me, he’d started to struggle at work with simple tasks like meeting deadlines, retrieving and recalling information, using the phone, multi-tasking. He likens having dementia to the weather: some days are sunny, but on others the clouds gather.

Later, I lie awake, unable to push dark thoughts from my mind. Is it really dementia? Might the doctors be wrong?

July 31, 2014

I’M SITTIng in the cramped office of the neurologist as she shuffles through her paperwork. As she starts to speak, I notice the pity in her eyes. She doesn’t say much, and doesn’t need to, because I’ve already glanced down at the papers in front of her and seen the word ‘Alzheimer’s’.

I’m 58 and I’ve been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s.

nothing prepares you for the feeling of emptiness. I know that these words — this letter — will change everything. They’ll steal the life I know.

It’s not so much a fear of death that hits me full-on, but a sense of time running out. That’s what dementia steals — the future you imagined all laid out in front of you, with no idea when something more final might come.

‘good luck,’ says the neurologist as I leave her office. I won’t see her again, because there’s no follow-up after diagnosis.

‘There’s nothing we can do, I’m afraid,’ she adds. In the days that follow, her words echo in my brain. All I can think of is that word ‘afraid’. It feels so negative, so scary.

What about if, instead, I’d been told in a different way: ‘Yes, the diagnosis is dementia. I’ll put you in touch with people who can help you to adapt, people who can share tips and tricks.’

I resolve to find out all there is to know about this dreadful disease. I’m going to continue working and I’ll remain independent for as long as I possibly can.

There’s always a way.