Hi, I’m primary carer for my mother, who’s just had a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s today but has been getting steadily less able to look after herself since the beginning of this year. We’ve now reached the stage where I’m spending about 12 hours a day looking after her, my daughter lives with her and takes the night shift (Mum walks to the village shop... in her pjs... without looking or listening for the traffic... in the middle of the night) so it’s been a very tough few months trying to look after my animals (I have a smallholding 4 miles away from Mum’s house - lots of poultry, rabbits, 4 horses and a few crazy ferrets to go with, of course, the whippets) as well as get Mum dressed appropriately, ensure she takes the right tablets at the right time (meds for hypertension, cholesterol, vitamins, diuretic), uses her inhaler, organise her cups of tea on the days she puts the milk in the kettle or carefully makes dilute hot milk because she’s forgotten what a teabag is, cook for her, remind her she’s had lunch four times already or that fruit pastilles are not a breakfast cereal, kidnap her clothes for washing (if we can persuade her to take them off at all - and I wish I could find a way to persuade her to wash herself!!), flush the loo after her and remind her to wash her hands, hold the same conversations over and over like Groundhog Day on steroids... all the other things that seem to come with dementia. Today she’s had to face up to surrendering her driving licence (we persuaded her to give us her keys a few months back, having watched her drive) and heard a doctor use the D word for the first time, so it’s a hard evening for her now. I’m hoping to pick up tips on which battles to pick (we’ve already agreed that unless she’s going out, three pairs of pjs will do all day!) and coping strategies. We’re lucky - local GPs have been great, council care team are chasing us to try and help and all my siblings have rallied round, though they live far away (Skye, Kent, Germany... and we’re in Aberdeenshire!) so... hello, and I’ll probably spend the next few weeks feeling my way in here and reading rather than posting, but hopefully I can put something back into the community as we go further into the rabbit hole.