I'm new here and probably posted this to the wrong place earlier...
My father-in-law has finally been diagnosed with Alzheimer's after 12-18 months of cancelled appointments, changes in Consultant and unbelievably slow response times. During this time he has deteriorated but I guess we will never know what difference it would have made to have know a year ago. He is only 67 and luckily he is a very bright man (and I suspect he has been affected for many years but has hidden it well by being a copious note taker). Now we are waiting for a formal assessment but the appointment is not for another 6 weeks or so. We want to help him make decisions but feel we are constantly putting off decision making while we await the outcome of one test or another.
He is still very independant and last week he went abroad to his timeshare on holiday. We got a phone call from a Spanish hospital to say he had had a fall and was very confused (no one knows what happened, least of all him, but he's got stitches in the back of his head). All sorts of silly little things then went wrong (went to get his flight home without his passport, lost his phone etc, etc).
My wife is pregnant and we also have a toddler and she is understandably getting very distressed. I haven't helped by saying that her and her brother need to take control of the situation and stop continually waiting for other people before something dreadful happens to him.
So the reason I'm posting on here is that we need to find someone who can help us understand what the short and medium term future is likely to look like for him so that we can make good decisions while we can still have sensible (albeit somewhat laboured) conversations with him about what he would ideally like to happen in certain circumstances; where and how he lives being the real biggies. Understandably this latest incident has scared us.
I have seen a number of references to paying for an assessment privately but I don't really know who would do this, what we would get or where to start the process. Can anyone give me more info?
My father-in-law has finally been diagnosed with Alzheimer's after 12-18 months of cancelled appointments, changes in Consultant and unbelievably slow response times. During this time he has deteriorated but I guess we will never know what difference it would have made to have know a year ago. He is only 67 and luckily he is a very bright man (and I suspect he has been affected for many years but has hidden it well by being a copious note taker). Now we are waiting for a formal assessment but the appointment is not for another 6 weeks or so. We want to help him make decisions but feel we are constantly putting off decision making while we await the outcome of one test or another.
He is still very independant and last week he went abroad to his timeshare on holiday. We got a phone call from a Spanish hospital to say he had had a fall and was very confused (no one knows what happened, least of all him, but he's got stitches in the back of his head). All sorts of silly little things then went wrong (went to get his flight home without his passport, lost his phone etc, etc).
My wife is pregnant and we also have a toddler and she is understandably getting very distressed. I haven't helped by saying that her and her brother need to take control of the situation and stop continually waiting for other people before something dreadful happens to him.
So the reason I'm posting on here is that we need to find someone who can help us understand what the short and medium term future is likely to look like for him so that we can make good decisions while we can still have sensible (albeit somewhat laboured) conversations with him about what he would ideally like to happen in certain circumstances; where and how he lives being the real biggies. Understandably this latest incident has scared us.
I have seen a number of references to paying for an assessment privately but I don't really know who would do this, what we would get or where to start the process. Can anyone give me more info?