The Power Of Our Memories
Living in a world where dementia is rising.
Dementia is a neurological disease defined by scientists as a"significant loss of intellectual abilities, such as memory capacity, that is severe enough to interfere with social or occupational functioning," but to the 50 million people suffering with the illness and their family members it means a lot more than that.
Dementia is a constant battle which tests your love, patience and commitment. It is a disease that robs people of their memories, sometimes too soon. It is harsh, it is fearful and it is an unpredictable illness. Reflecting on dementia, it not only makes you appreciate every day life but widens your eyes to make you realise the importance of our memories, however simple they may be.
Losing your memory is something that I believe we all worry about happening to us in our lifetime. The amount of times I have wound myself up because I can't remember where I left my car keys, scrambling into the depths of my handbag, searching under the scrap pieces of paper in the kitchen until I find them, eventually, lying in the most obvious place. The feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you draw a blank and can't remember where you last had your mobile phone. Did I leave it on the shop counter? Is it in my handbag? Or perhaps I just left it at home.
This made me realise, it must be an incredibly scary and lonely place for millions of people who suffer a much more severe level of memory loss.
My grandfather, John Loseby is someone who has felt the effects of dementia increasing over the past 2 years. He spoke to me openly about 'losing it' as he aknowledges and understands that he can get lost from time to time. He knows that he forgets where he is, names, places and locations of things however, he says to cope with the illness he has to accept it whilst he can.
The number of people living with dementia is rising drastically and has been as far claimed in news headlines to be the "UK's biggest killer."
Dementia has become one of the main causes for disablitly later in life, over taking that of heart disease, cancer or strokes. We as a generation are slowly begining to lose the members of our elder population due to parts of their memory slipping away from them. It is the simple ordinary things, the every day routine that becomes jumbled and chaotic, many sufferers forget when to eat, where the car is parked or what to wear on a morning.
However, different people's dementia varies and so does their memory loss. According to Pamela Manners, a GP with experience in treating people with dementia, loss of memory is on the increase as a result of our ageing population. She began to inform me that, as a GP, you only get snapshots of patients, rather than a full picture. Certainly with dementia, there is even more of a varied picture, depending on how advanced the disease. What Pamela took from working with dementia patients is that, “Memory holds such an importance to us as individuals, it does define us in some way because if we start to lose the basic knowledge of where things are in the household, who people are, key memories from our childhood and our adulthood lives then we would eventually slowly lose touch with who we are and our personalities would begin to fade because of this.”
This really highlighted to me, the importance of our memories and the effects that losing fragments of the mind can have, not only the people suffering with the disease but their family members as well.
David Catchpole, Company Director and father of four, is someone who lost his mother six years ago to dementia. He told me, "The thing that I think about most often with dementia is that it is like a living bereavement. The person is still with you but they don't resemble the person you once knew." He descibes dementia as 'all engrossing' as he found it was almost like looking after a small child in your care at all hours of the day.
David took a deep breath as he reminised on the past, "As a family member who cared for someone with dementia, I've learnt you need to remember to be kind to yourself, as well as the person you're caring for. It can be awfully time consuming and you have to have strong relationships with other people in your lives because it does take up a lot of your time." This stressed to me the strong and terrible impact that dementia can have on other people's lives, as well as the sufferer.
Doreen Catchpole
Doreen Catchpole
David's mother, Doreen Catchpole started showing signs of dementia in 2005 and gradually deteriorated until she passed in 2014. For 9 years, her three children, Anne, Sue and David managed the constant forget-fullness. Doreen started forgetting the simple things, things your mind naturally may forget from time to time, such as where the car keys were or forgetting to lock the doors at night. As the disease became more advanced, the family noticed she was forgetting when to eat meals and Doreen became quite angry at the disease.
"It put a lot of pressure on my relationship with my mother, but it wasn't my mum when we had arguements or unusual behaviour, she changed from being kind, gentle, placid and caring person to having outbursts of temper, lashing out and being quite verbally abusive, which was totally out of character and incredibly hard to rationalise. "
The last side effect of the illness was that she became very confused who her family was, she forgot the names of her children and grand children. She began to forget who had visited her in the care home and slowly, everyone around her became as if they were a stranger.
"She loved nothing more than being with us. Family was the most important thing to her."
Doreen Catchpole (middle) surrounded by her three children, Anne, Sue and David
Doreen Catchpole (middle) surrounded by her three children, Anne, Sue and David
Dementia is going to become more prevelant in the years to come and so understanding how to manage and cope with it is becoming more emergent. According to World Health Organisation, the number of people living with dementia is likely to double every 20 years.
I wanted to know why. Why do some brains become diseased with dementia and why some don’t? Why when we age do we become susceptible to forgetting more things? What is the difference between a brain suffering from dementia and a brain that just forgets things purely because of old age?
“Assuming that we are talking about a normal aged mind, the memories are stored throughout the brain, but it’s the frontal lobes, the ‘thinking’ bits, that do the remembering, that cause specific memories to be activated. It’s like the processor on a computer, and the stored memories are the data on the hard drive. The ability to access and utilise memories is all dependent on the good functioning of the frontal lobes. If you invoke things like Alzheimer’s and Dementia, then the stored memories are indeed lost as regions of the brain they’re found in die off on a large scale.” Said neuroscientist writer, Dean Burnett.
Dean Burnett, Neuroscientist
Dean Burnett, Neuroscientist
There is a great importance of being aware of what ‘forgetting’ actually means in a neuroscientific context. “Some people assume it means the memory is gone, hence you can’t recall it. But most evidence suggests that the memory is still there in the brain, it’s actually our ability to access it which is compromised.” The human memory is supported by three stages; encoding, storage and retrieval. “It is the retrieval part which is most vulnerable to forgetting because the mechanisms that seek out and trigger desired memories have a lot more to do, and a much harder job than the memory itself, which basically sits there until it is needed.”
My grandfather, who is experiencing the early signs of dementia, describes the disease as a “dark, strong, mental blockage” and I can now see why he feels like that, because neurologically, part of his brain is dead, there is little to no memory there.
A study was taken by Dementia Care Central, comparing two brains who lived to be the same age, same height and weight aswell as being the same gender. The brain of a dementia patient is evidently smaller than the brain of a healthy individual. The brain actually shrinks down to as little as one-third its normal size as the disease advances. When looking at a healthy brain, the cerebral cortex (folds of the brain) are very full and are closely packed together. In contrast to this, a brain swarmed by dementia disease has folds that are much more narrow than a normal brain, and the gaps that are between the folds appear wider.
In addition to the physical changes that can be seen between the two brains, there is also a noticable change in colour too.
What is taken from the study is that there is definitely noticeable structural and chemical changes in the brain. It is not surprising that a person who suffers from dementia loses the ability to function on their own, requiring assistence, patience, love and care from their families and the support staff that specialise in the illness.
For the families of dementia sufferers, it can be hard to just accept the illness, though many are positive, the sad realisation with dementia is you just don't know how bad it could get.
Support is crucial, not only for the sufferer but for the families of those who have the illness. Dementia is a powerful illness which, if you let it, can surround you in a turmoil of fear and confusion.
From speaking to the family's of those with dementia I learnt that fighting dementia with fear and worry only makes the sufferer feel more vulnerable and out of place and there is an importance to make sure they feel they still have a sense of purpose.
"Enter their world, don't argue if they think it's Monday and it's actually Friday, they think it's tea time, it's actually breakfast. Don't worry about it, just go with whatever they feel is right because that stops all of the anxiety and frustrations they feel when they're constanlty being told they've forgotten things or got things wrong."
The human impact dementia brings across generations when a member of your close family has the illness is huge. I spoke to two families who have felt all the raw emotions that dementia gives rise to: despair, frustration, desperate love and pain. Besides sharing the fact both families had battled with the illness, they also held the same powerful attribute when they spoke. Positivity.
