Tuesday, October 25, 2011

'Now what do I do with you' : Notes on meeting Sarah and Richard

Meeting with Sarah, a woman with in the early stages of AD, and her husband Richard, was fascinating and unusual, because Sarah is in the relatively rare position of being able to reflect on her own condition. The main thing for Sarah, an otherwise very sociable person with a big and loving family, was forgetting people’s names. Knowing that she knows them - sometimes people she has knows for forty years or more - but not knowing who they were. This also affects her use of the phone, which she has now given up altogether.

Sarah told us of the time recently when she had packed a suitcase for a holiday, only to realise when when they arrived that all the clothes she’d packed were completely inappropriate.

She told us (with good humour), of looking blankly at the washing machine, thinking ‘now, what do I do with you?’.

We asked Sarah if there was a particular moment she associates with realising she had AD and she told us of a time (really, she said, the last time) she prepared a complicated meal and put the wrong thing in the mince. It wasn’t very nice.

Sometimes, Sarah said, she forgets to have lunch and is worried that, if she weren’t reminded, she’d forget to eat altogether.

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