Interview 02

In the case of my wife and myself we were I suppose, should I say, fortunate in that two of her aunts developed dementia in their 70s so it was not a new experience for us although we never thought that we would be personally involved. But we first noticed it when my wife was driving. 

We used to drive down to Spain for the winter and my wife was a very, very good, very confident driver so the way we did it was one of us would drive for 2 hours while the other one would have a snooze in the back seat and that way we used to do the 750 miles down to Malaga very often in a day. And on one occasion fortunately I wasn't snoozing in the back I was sitting in the passenger seat when we came to a large traffic island and my wife suddenly said "Which way do I go round?" and we realised then there was something strange happening and after the next stop and changeover my wife said "I don't feel I can drive any more." That would be in 1991.  

Then we didn't think too much about it at the time except that occasionally she said she had wavy lines in front of her eyes which was a type of migraine and it passed if she lay down for a little while but it was evidently something more serious.  

And then in I think it would be about October 91, we flew out to Kuala Lumpur to see our son who was working out there and while we were staying there my wife began to lose her way between the block of apartments where we were staying and the restaurant over the road where we used to go to breakfast every morning. We would set off and she wasn't sure which way to turn. So when we got home we talked about this and said you know well this is what happened to Auntie Madge and Auntie Renee we'd better do something about it. And my wife said "Yes what do we do?"