Three years ago:
The psychiatrist asked, Do you know why you have come to the clinic? Yes, I have Alzheimers. What do you understand by that? I have tangles in the brain …
Now:
I don’t need you. There is nothing wrong with me.
I decided last evening to challenge this. We were talking about her medication. (The anti-dementia drugs that NICE has said are not value for money. So we have to pay for them ourselves, as they are value for money for us. ) I said, they are good for your head. Because you get muddled. Because you find some things difficult. I used the word, Alzhemers. She looked at me as if I had just blurted out an awful diagnosis that she had never heard of (and this must have been how she experienced this moment.) She was devastated, struck out her arm, like a king fu fighter.
I thought for a moment that I was right to be doing this, trying to be real – earlier in the day we had been struggling with her determined rejection of help from the carer, who she used to trust, and had been helping her for more than three years.
It is the same question that I have asked before. What do you do when you are in different worlds - try to make connections or pass like ships in the night?
But this was the wrong time, the wrong place. The door bell went and my family arrived … my son comforted her, my brother went to work on the making of a ramp into the garden, and Christine made the evening meal.
The evening carer returned and Anna went to bed. But she still had the devastated face of someone who had heard terrible news.