Brian Bailie - Alzheimers Timeline

I am just the son of a beautiful woman whose mind was stolen from her.

Im not a doctor, I need a spell-checker to write psychiatrist . Ive no medical education or experience. And there are millions of people just like me, who really dont understand half the information were told by health professionals. So I want to just describe my experience of Alzheimers disease in my family, in plain language, like it was, and how it is.

Over the past fourteen years or so, Mums mind has dissolved relentlessly, like sugar in warm water, and it has left her in a perpetual existence of total and complete mental and physical inability and total dependency.

Yes, this is a personal, frequently embarrassing and emotional story for me to write. But I know that my mum would want her experience and suffering to be used to help and prepare others; to help you avoid the mistakes that I made; to speak to you in the honest words of a simple helpless layman.

The thing about hindsight is that it only makes you wiser if youre going to do something over again. I dont like to think about having to care for another loved one with dementia, but Id like to think that my story will help others. So the sole reason for publishing this account of my mums decline is the hope that my experience and my hindsight will help you:

Help you to anticipate problems.

Help you to plan care arrangements.

Help you to prepare practically and emotionally.

Help you to realise the importance of legal and financial issues.

Ive had to walk a delicate line: I have a younger sister, and an elder brother. Hilary was happy enough for me to make decisions and change things within reason, but because Paul is older than me, I really felt that he shouldve been more involved with the significant decisions, especially any decisions to do with moving money around, or spending it. But Paul had emigrated years ago, and so his involvement was limited to his opinion, and his approval or disapproval.

Trust is the key. Not that I was mistrusted, but the first decision I made about my involvement with Mum and Dad was that everything that I did would be totally transparent. Consequently, the only reason that I can catalogue Mums decline so accurately is because I put everything in writing: every event, every decision, every incident, every diagnosis was written down and emailed to Paul as it happened. So this little book, and the accuracy of the timeline of Mums decline into total dependency, is the direct result of my correspondence with my brother.

To help me identify the clinical stages of my mums Alzheimers disease Im using the seven-stage scale developed by renowned Alzheimers specialist, Dr Barry Reisberg . This is known as the Global Deterioration Scale . This scale is used by mental health professionals to categorise the phases of degeneration with Alzheimers disease.