Mayday call if dementia strikes
J WHAT a week for birthdays. They cluster in our family at this time of year like dancers around a maypole. Richard’s was on Monday. Mine on Thursday. Son Jack’s tomorrow.
Indeed May seems to be the fated month for nativity amongst the Madeley clan. It’s weird. Richard’s dad’s was on the 2nd; his grandmother’s on the 12th. Even my son Dan’s wife’s birthday is on the 20th. May, May, May. Our lot probably keepWHSmith’s card section in business at this time of year.
Of course, Richard and I are the oldest surviving Maysters by far. He was 68 this week. On Thursday I was... I was... I was... d’you know, I can’t bring myself to write it down. Let’s just say that the King and I are “of an age”.
Perhaps there’s been a subtle but dynamic shift in the way we regard the real-life consequences of ageing. As Richard wrote here last week, it’s not that long ago that reaching your three-score years-and-ten was seen as completing some kind of marathon.
You hadn’t fallen by the wayside; you’d breasted the tape and done the distance. No one, least of all yourself, expected you to hang around for all that much longer.The averages said it all. Get past 70, and your clogs were practically asking to be popped.
But if life expectancy has risen dramatically in the last two or three decades, it’s come at a price; it’s brought with it a host of anxieties mostly unknown to our grandparents’ generation, and the generations before.
Dementia’s the big one, obviously. Yes, “getting on” has long been associated with absent-mindedness and confusion, but until at least the mid-20th century most people conked out well before dementia really sank its teeth in.
Sadly, today it’s the leading cause of death in the country.
So unlike our grandparents – who’d never even heard the words “dementia” or “Alzheimer’s” – we worry about it.We’re constantly checking ourselves, aren’t we?
Is forgetting why we just opened the fridge an early warning sign? Or mislaying the car keys? Or struggling to remember if it wasWilliam Hague or Ian Duncan Smith who took over from John Major as Tory leader? Of course, generally it’s others – family, friends or colleagues – who make that first, hesitant diagnosis.
Former newsreader Alastair Stewart, who is 71, wrote movingly in the Daily Express this week about his own vascular dementia.
His wife Sally Ann Jung began to spot the tell-tale signs: Alastair was struggling to tie his shoelaces or fasten his belt. Colleagues at his news studio noticed he was arriving for work hours early, and increasingly (and untypically) dishevelled. But he says early diagnosis has provided him with “clarity and treatment”.
So while Richard and I will continue to shun our birthday celebrations, if either of us ever thinks dementia has come knocking at the door, it will be a case of (to quote the late Alan Clark MP) “run, don’t walk, to the doctor”.