When you write a comment on a blog, it appears in my inbox with an invitation to go to the part of my site that I can access to make this comment appear at the end of the post. This has not happened for very many months. I was considering leaving the blogs about Dementia and going back to being funny.
However, suddenly last night, up popped a comment and an invitation to do something about the vast mass of comments that had been piling up since late 2013. Remember 2013? No, me neither.
The upshot is that there has been something a bit wrong with the website for several months and all of your comments have been piling up in the ether or virtualland, or fairyville or anywhere but in my inbox. The S&H, who has been home for four days has just departed but I have brought this to his attention and I’m sure he’ll correct it when he has time.
I have now printed off and read everything you have been saying since last year. I thought I was alone with my mother and her disease and had been for a long time because there was no sign that anyone was reading (other than the analytic website which currently tells me that people read in 38 languages in 46 countries.) (Incredible, fantastico, incroyable, dhiaskedhastiko, unglaublich and mirabile dictu.) (but I still didn’t believe it.) and some lovely phone calls and cards and letters.
Apparently, however, you are. I was not walking alone at all, if there were no footprints it was because I was being carried and had no idea I was. I could bore you (if it isn’t you) with a long list of names but I’d just like very briefly to say hello to Roz, Janet, Susan, Megan, Pat and as always. Sheila and Esther. Many readers have shared with me very personal comments, so I am going to mark all the responses as read but not publish any of them because so many contain details of the lives of others which are private and amazing.
When I began writing Dementia Diaries I did it to help anyone else with the same problem. Thirty years ago we couldn’t say Alzheimers without explaining that it was a presenile dementia, which invariably elicited the response: What? As regular readers know, my poor father-in-law, who had no guidance or support at all used my new husband and I as support and came and lived off us every other weekend for five years at the end of which he developed diabetes, I had cancer and we were £16,000 in debt.
Thirty years on things have moved a little. I have had helpful access to two specialist doctors and the Internet, thank you thank you thank you Tim, well done. Because of the help I found online, every medical person I met since my mother’s illness enquired if I had medical training because I was able to be knowledgeable about the disease and get the best out of every doctor’s appointment and be able to discuss treatments with a background of understanding of the latest research and information.
There have also been some helpful leaflets hanging around in surgeries and waiting rooms. These tend to look more on the bright side than Monty Python. Most are illustrated either with comic little cartoons of a demented person doing something puzzling and fairly hilarious or are fronted with soft focus photographs of sweet little old pensioners leafing through scrapbook albums with a happy smile on their adorably crinkled faces. Despite the all pervading cheerfulness, I notice they all tell you if the demented person becomes physically aggressive your best recourse is to leave at the trot.
None of which really helps with the day to day practicalities of being responsible for the care of a demented person.
So I decided to tell it like it is, in the hope of helping someone with the same problem to make the best and most informed choices.
The stories I have read in the emails readers have sent have been humbling, inspiring and amazing. I thank you for your support, love and confidences all of which I respect. I shall continue to blog the Dementia Dairies, though whether or not I will publish them in paper, which many people have suggested, I don’t know.
To anyone who writes about 24th and 48th scale, I will I will and there will be 48th dolls in the shop, with good and magnifyable faces just as soon as I have time; to everyone the parrot will land again soon, I promise, he is not dead, he has not joined the choir invisible, he is not pushing up daisies or shuffled off his mortal perch and fallen to the carpet with a muffled thud, nay even an unquiet bonk or flop.
And neither has my ghastly parent and we’re off there again, even though she is not speaking to me (hooray! How long can it last?) (Two minutes, tops.)
And to the vast number of readers who the analytics tell me are single young males between 25 and 35 in any of 46 countries I’d like to say: Couppa di Mondo eh? Eh?? Fantastico, incroyable, unglaublich etcetera.
Thank you for writing, emailing, phoning and sending your kind thoughts and news.
Right back at you.
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JaneLaverick.com – stunned but not shaken.