I’m Anne and in April I’ll be walking the last 117km of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela to raise funds for Alzheimer Scotland.

My dad was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia in 2009 and passed away seven years later in 2016. FTD is one of the rare dementias, and it comes in different guises. Rather than affecting the memory, it attacks the ability to speak articulately, understand the meaning of words, initiate and carry out complex tasks, understand other’s intentions, and changes personalities. One of the cruellest parts of this set of diseases is that the memory is intact but access to memory becomes impaired and has to be triggered by external stimulation.

Dan is the bravest men I ever knew as he battled against a disease he didn’t even know he had. Through him and his disease, I learned a lot about the importance of autonomy, capacity and consent, and how destructive it is when it is denied. That has stayed with me and is one of the reasons I now volunteer for NDCAN, which is the National Dementia Carers’ Action Network.

Dan loved being outdoors and loved walking in the countryside. So this is for him.

I’ll be blogging in the run up to the walk and also during it at: Hamey: Travels without Dan https://hameytravelswithoutdan.travel.blog/ and updating on Twitter at @Hamey_the_dug

If you’re wondering about Hamey, he was Dan’s constant companion for the last years of his life. All will become clear in the blog...

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