Welcome to our little club. It's not so little and the club is studded with nails, but beggar's can't be choosers, eh?
The marvellous thing about dementia is that the diagnosis comes from the medical profession, but all the expertise seems to have to come from family and carers. And there's no manual, just a steep, scary, miserable learning curve covered in grease, broken dreams and... well, ginger nuts mushed up with tea, apparently. Excuse me while I disappear for a moment to redirect Mum's supper from the carpet into the bin.
Right, where was I? Oh yes, trying to depress you even further! But you already know what a lousy hand your mother's been dealt, and it's up to you to try and help her make the most of it. It's a thankless task, most of the time, but it's also one of the most worthwhile ones. Imagine where your mother would be without your support? You might not be perfect, but you're every bit as imperfect as the rest of us. We're all out here waving and drowning at the same time, and this place gives us somewhere to occasionally grab a hand to hang onto until we get our strength back.
You poor old Mum's probably been unsettled by the diagnosis, and even if she doesn't remember it, the emotional impact of the diagnosis rattles around like a pinball inside folk, causing chaos. My mother didn't speak to me for days after hers, because it was all my fault for dragging her to the hospital. Then she completely forgot what had made her feel that way, but she certainly remembered whatever it was was my fault!
Such is the carer's lot. You will learn to cope, or find ways to cope via the help of others. You will get angry, you will do things you regret, you will wonder how you'll survive the next minute, let alone the next day, week, month or year. But you will never stop caring about the person who cared for you, and you will always know that no matter how scary it is for you, it's worse for your mother. Sometimes I find that if I focus on that for a while, it helps me get a grip.
Sometimes it just makes me want to cry though, and that's when I tend to lurk here, reading other people's troubles and feeling a bit less lonely.
I wish you and your mother all the best on the road ahead. It's a long, bumpy ride to somewhere nobody wants to go... a bit like a daytrip to Rhyl in February. But it's the company we keep that makes any journey bearable. Your mother has you. You have us. We have each other.
And something tells me I really ought to delete that last paragraph, because it's made me a little bit nauseous on this bumpy coach trip (knew I shouldn't have had that third candyfloss before we left for home!) I'm not normally this sentimental, but after six weeks of incredibly disturbed sleep, no end in sight to my mother's stubborn UTI, and a hospital appointment to try and get her to tomorrow, my way of coping is typing until I wished I'd stopped sooner.
