Newbie

[Paisia]

Hallo,

We've just heard that mum's memory loss is due to her having had a mini stroke during sleep. She has now been diagnosed with early stages vascular dementia and or Alzheimer's, she is 76 yrars old. She has high cholesterol but that seemed to be under control, she also has a muscle disease her whole life, which they are only now researching, together with osteo arthritis, so she doesn't get around too much. No one is actually sure when this happened, and given that our household has always been on the noisy side we never noticed anything really. I'm wondering if any of you have parents who are foreigners and did they lose their ability to speak English in the later stages ? I thought it might be an idea if we at home started learning Spanish to make communication easier for her later on. I have another question also and I hope I'm not making a boo boo here, but I have a friend who said doctors can only go by statistics and every person is different, there is not way they can predict mum's future, she could very well stage at this stage and no worse. Do any of you have any experience with this ?

Thank you
Paisia

 

[Beate]

Welcome to Talking Point, Paisia.

Doctors can't tell you more about your Mum's progression than you or I can. If you've seen one person with dementia, you've seen one person with dementia. Your Mum could stay the same for a long time or she could get worse tomorrow. Eventually she will get worse but there is no point fretting about it now - just take each day as it comes.

 

[SoyHJ]

Hello Paisia, we aren't exactly in the same situation as your Mum but from the point of view of the ability to speak a foreign language, I would imagine it would depend on how fluent your Mum was before. We live in Spain and while my husband (he now has early stage AD) was never exactly fluent I notice that he is already losing a lot of what he used to be able to say in Spanish without too many problems previously.

If Spanish is your Mum's native language it could be quite a good idea to start learning it yourselves.

 

[Paisia]

Welcome to Talking Point, Paisia.

Doctors can't tell you more about your Mum's progression than you or I can. If you've seen one person with dementia, you've seen one person with dementia. Your Mum could stay the same for a long time or she could get worse tomorrow. Eventually she will get worse but there is no point fretting about it now - just take each day as it comes.

Hallo Beate and thank you for the welcome, I still need to post something about myself but that will come.

Thank you for sharing, so no one really knows how things will progress. Then we take it day by day.

P

 

[Paisia]

Hello Paisia, we aren't exactly in the same situation as your Mum but from the point of view of the ability to speak a foreign language, I would imagine it would depend on how fluent your Mum was before. We live in Spain and while my husband (he now has early stage AD) was never exactly fluent I notice that he is already losing a lot of what he used to be able to say in Spanish without too many problems previously.

If Spanish is your Mum's native language it could be quite a good idea to start learning it yourselves.

Halloo SoyHJ, and thank you for responding. Mum's English has always been terrible, so if speaking Spanish takes less effort for her, then we better get our books out pronto
P

 

[SoyHJ]

Halloo SoyHJ, and thank you for responding. Mum's English has always been terrible, so if speaking Spanish takes less effort for her, then we better get our books out pronto
P

Muy pronto! xx