Personal
On Dementia
According to an article on the ABC News site today, dementia is the leading cause of death in Australia as of 2025.
And according to my father’s doctors, he has dementia, as of last weekend.
On Saturday, dad was a functioning human being. He’d driven himself and his wife to a small town a few hours away, where they stayed the night. On Sunday, he was having trouble remembering where they were, and was too shaky to drive. By Monday he was back home, saw his GP (general practitioner, or family doctor) who said it was simply a bit of confusion related to his diabetes, and not to worry. The GP requested no tests but scheduled an appointment in 8 days with a specialist.
On Tuesday I helped get dad to a previously scheduled followup appointment with his podiatrist. Dad was a little confused and was swinging between not being able to dress himself and having reasonably lucid, if slow, conversations. His podiatrist was shocked by the change, and told us to take him to the ER immediately, which we did. Dad’s been in the hospital for five days now, and his brain is shattered.
He can congratulate me when I tell him I’ve got a busy week coming up, which means he understands what I’ve said and remembers that business has been slow for me lately. But then he tells people I haven’t been to see him. He’ll tell me his stepson came to visit, but then tell his wife a few hours later that the same stepson did not visit.
Dad will tell me how his day is going, how comfortable his bed is, how well the nurses treat him. He’ll complain that the doctors don’t always listen to what he has to say, and without missing a beat tell me how he’s cracked the mystery of all the extra thick rotating doors in his ward. “That’s how they swap members of one family with another. The doctors deny it, but I figured it out. It was a huge problem when they swapped a member of a Catholic family with a Jewish one. There was lots of yelling about it. They didn’t think I could hear it but my hearing is still pretty good.”
Two weeks ago dad was going through his photo album, scanning some old photos. He was telling me the stories behind some of them, like the photo of a car in a muddy field. “That was a brand new car, at the dealership where I worked. I borrowed it for the weekend and went racing with it, but the track was really muddy and the transmission filled with mud and I could barely drive it back to the dealership. I spent all of Sunday and Sunday night tearing it apart and cleaning it up and putting it back together before anyone found out.”
I arranged to meet with my dad, bring a microphone, and record some of these stories, because they were great. In another photo he showed the Renault he took ice racing, slammed into a few too many snowbanks and the following week got a very surprised call from Renault’s head office, wondering why this two day old car needed a new bumper, fender, door and assorted parts.
This week dad’s telling me that the slats in his window are broken because he tried to break the window with a chair, because the police wouldn’t come no matter how much he yelled for help. He was convinced the staff were giving him the wrong medication.
The nurses corroborated the window story after they called me at 10pm one night, asking me to come calm my father down, because he’d barricaded his door and was yelling for help.
An MRI showed a significant build-up of plaque in dad’s brain, a sure sign of Alzheimer’s disease, but when we asked why he went from normal to shattered in one day last weekend, they said only that he’s probably been showing signs for a long time. He’s just reached a tipping point. And when we all look back, for sure, there were signs.
It’s been hard to talk to dad for a decade or more, because he likes to talk about the same things. He gets on conversational rails and I learned to kind of jolt him off those rails to pay attention to what’s going on around him with carefully chosen words. This wasn’t dementia, it was just dad being dad. He’s been like that for 20 years. Sure it’s been a bit worse lately…
Oh.
His wife says he’s been forgetting things more often. Conversations they’ve had, where dad’s adamant that he never heard any such thing. He called me once a couple of years ago. He’s got monitor problems, a faded patch where a grey background was too bright. But only on one website! When I checked it out, it was the background on that site. Dad’s a computer guy, he shouldn’t have had trouble with this.
And more recently, he’d somehow enabled dual-mode colour on his high end photography monitor. It’s a feature that allows you to see an image with two different colour spaces, which can sometimes be handy. I showed him how to turn it off, but he turned it on again the next day, and decided to just live with one side of his monitor being redder than the other.
The signs were indeed there.
Last week I could ask for advice about repairing the wooden floor under my kitchen, or replacing the engine mounts in my car, or what kind of sealant to use on the plumbing under my sink.
This week I’m actually impressed that he remembers why he’s in the hospital. But while he knows why, he doesn’t really. His brain is still completely loopy. He proudly relayed how he scored zero on a cognitive test because every question they asked him was logically nonsensical, and he argued that with them. “They should use better tests. They really didn’t expect me to be smart enough to expose the problems in the test.”
Dad was always smart, inquisitive, technically oriented. While talking to the hospital staff I was telling them what kind of person dad was, his whole life. I wanted to give them a wider perspective of dad as a whole person. They did, I think, really appreciate it, but it didn’t change anything. Dad was still broken, and they never did treat my father with anything but respect and consideration.
It’s probably dad’s inquisitive mind that leads his brain to concoct stories about a room full of boxes that was obviously a sign that someone was packing up and stealing all the hospital equipment. His brain can’t make sense of something so he works out the reasons for what he’s seeing. But his brain doesn’t work right anymore.
A few weeks ago we had a family dinner, and a photo was taken of my father and I sticking our tongues out for the camera. It was his idea, and the photo is great.
This week he won’t wear his hospital gown because the straps are where they put the needles.
Dad loved Uncle Scrooge comics. He found out I had an archive on my computer, and he asked me to load them on his tablet to read in the hospital.
He can’t remember how to use his tablet anymore.
I’m going to miss my father.
I already do.
--NFG
[ Sep 27 2025 ]
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Tursilion
Sep 27 2025