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On 19th March I will be running the Richmond Half Marathon and then on 23rd April, Barry will be running The Virgin London Marathon in memory of Dad.  Barry will be running in a pink flamingo outfit...me, no, I'm running in normal clothes unless someone donates enough to persuade me!

Looking back it is obvious that Dad had started with the Lewy Bodies Dementia in 2013. Mum was his carer and life with Dad had become increasingly difficult for her.  Dad had lived under the Heathrow flight path most of his life and there he was believing the planes were crashing behind the houses as they landed, and that was the tip of the iceberg. The hallucinations and paranoia were heart breaking to watch, with Mum being at the brunt of things.  Trying to get a diagnosis was not easy but we persuaded him to see the doctor in April 2015. He had seen a doctor at a different surgery a couple of years back when he was first worried but was told him that he "shouldn't worry as he hadn't forgotten where he live!"  We finally got the results at the beginning of November 2015.  There was finally light at the end of the tunnel but on the 26th November 2015, Dad collapsed from a cardiac arrest. He was resuscitated  for 45 minutes and brought back, he was taken to Hammersmith Hospital and was in ICU for 10 days.  The doctors did not know if the LBD had stopped him recovering at all but they would have expected him to have shown more signs at this point.  We decided (with knowledge of a conversation we had had with him several years back) that Dad would not have wanted to be left like this and made the heart breaking decision to let him go.  We are grateful that Dad had seen his granson grow up and go to university, that although he forgot places he never got lost or wandered and was able to still enjoy his long walks, and he never forgot who we were.

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