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I have tried for the last five years to get a ballot place in this event.  Now that my body is 5 year's older I was successful!  Those who knew Mum would know that she would find that funny!  To be truthful, I probably couldn't have done it at any other time because its taken that long for the whole family to recover from what was a very sad time in all of our lives. 

On September 11 I am taking part in the Great North Run. I was about to say ‘running in’ but that might be stretching things a bit . For me it will probably be a combination of walk and run interspersed by sections of crawling but I will get to the finish line, hopefully upright.

My mum died from dementia in November 2012. Dementia affects many people but for most they have what I call ‘happy dementia’ which means they are fairly content with their day-to-day and don’t know what or who they’ve forgotten. It’s really hard on the families and carers nonetheless. Mum had a combination of dementias – Alzheimer’s, Vascular and something called Lewy Bodies. For the last 18 months of her life she lived in a state of almost constant terror and anxiety and hallucinated continually, eventually becoming violent at times. It was harrowing for everyone and I don’t use that term lightly. For my sister and me our lives were put on hold and everything and everyone took second place to mum. Mum’s only reassurance was if one of us was there and even at the end when she didn’t really know who we were she calmed down when we there… which meant that pretty much one of us was … 24/7! Because of Mum’s other medical problems (she had been insulin dependent for more than 40 years and her diabetes was out of control) I remember countless nights spent with her in resus because she had refused to eat (everything was poison!) and then trying to stop her pull the drips out of her arms when she was feeling slightly better. If anyone wants any insight into trying to deal with someone in hospital with dementia send them to me!

For more than a year afterwards I couldn’t really talk about it. Obviously given what I do I wrote it down but even that was hard. Initially what I wrote was very dark (perhaps I should sell it to HBO?) but in the end I managed to add some humour. A casting director friend helped me with it and pointed out that I needed to make sure people wanted to watch episode 2 or turn the page or, alternatively, broadcast on Halloween! (thanks WB). Anyway, series and now book are finished and this event for me sort of brings things to a close.

I think of mum often. She was only 80 when she died.  I miss getting a card on my birthday saying ‘Happy Christmas’ … and that was before the dementia! I do wonder whether had she been diagnosed earlier she would perhaps still be with us and with appropriate medication would now be travelling down the road to ‘Happy Dementia Land’ but her diabetes masked the symptoms of dementia for several years and by the time it was diagnosed it was too late for any treatment. 

One in three of us will be touched by dementia, either through knowing someone with it, caring for someone or developing it ourselves.  My wish is that there will be a time when we can say that people are truly living well with dementia.

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