Hello all,
I posted a long while ago about my father in law, & received some wonderful responses. You're a lovely lot, & I really need your help now.
My FiL has continued to deteriorate. I & my partner, are now in no doubt at all that he is indeed suffering from dementia. His word-finding is profoundly affected, he is unable to follow long instructions or join in conversation, he entirely forgets recent events and is very confused and passive most of the time. Recently his spacial awareness seems to have declined, and I've noticed him bumping into people and things quite a bit. He still drives, which is a worry. He needs a satnav & help to operate this, and help to use his mobile phone or count his change.
Family friends have expressed their concern to us. Last week he ate a raw bacon sandwich, forgetting to cook it or perhaps mistaking it for ham.
The problem is, his wife, daughter and closest friends insist he is fine. They are clinging to his original GP diagnosis - anxiety - and cannot be persuaded to see any other possibility. It is abject denial - sadly he is currently a ghost of the man he was, and it is frightening and frustrating to think that a window of medication treatment might be rapidly closing, and baffling to me that something so pronounced could be missed by intelligent, insightful people!
So my questions I suppose are this:
1) family members - what did people say to you early on that was helpful in prompting you to seek further treatment? Did anyone here go through a period of denial like this?
2)People with a diagnosis - did you know there was a problem prior to family intervention? How much is my FiL likely to be aware of his condition & denying it too? Whenever we ask him about it he looks panicked and says he is fine.
3) If we were to write to the GP formally expressing our concerns (& our disappointment that he has been dismissed 3x by them!!) would we be able to request that this letter is concealed from the rest of the family? Is it likely to help?
Many thanks for any insight xxx
I posted a long while ago about my father in law, & received some wonderful responses. You're a lovely lot, & I really need your help now.
My FiL has continued to deteriorate. I & my partner, are now in no doubt at all that he is indeed suffering from dementia. His word-finding is profoundly affected, he is unable to follow long instructions or join in conversation, he entirely forgets recent events and is very confused and passive most of the time. Recently his spacial awareness seems to have declined, and I've noticed him bumping into people and things quite a bit. He still drives, which is a worry. He needs a satnav & help to operate this, and help to use his mobile phone or count his change.
Family friends have expressed their concern to us. Last week he ate a raw bacon sandwich, forgetting to cook it or perhaps mistaking it for ham.
The problem is, his wife, daughter and closest friends insist he is fine. They are clinging to his original GP diagnosis - anxiety - and cannot be persuaded to see any other possibility. It is abject denial - sadly he is currently a ghost of the man he was, and it is frightening and frustrating to think that a window of medication treatment might be rapidly closing, and baffling to me that something so pronounced could be missed by intelligent, insightful people!
So my questions I suppose are this:
1) family members - what did people say to you early on that was helpful in prompting you to seek further treatment? Did anyone here go through a period of denial like this?
2)People with a diagnosis - did you know there was a problem prior to family intervention? How much is my FiL likely to be aware of his condition & denying it too? Whenever we ask him about it he looks panicked and says he is fine.
3) If we were to write to the GP formally expressing our concerns (& our disappointment that he has been dismissed 3x by them!!) would we be able to request that this letter is concealed from the rest of the family? Is it likely to help?
Many thanks for any insight xxx