Introduction

My mother's memory has been deteriorating over the last few years. Along with this, she has had increased anxiety and confusion. It seemed to start about 4 or 5 years ago (she was 62) , just after she had breast cancer. She'd had a lumpectomy and was taking medication and that's when we first noticed her memory starting to fail.

It began with simple things that befall many of us -- mostly forgetting names, having trouble finding the word to use in a sentence, and sometimes repeating a question she had already asked. We knew the cancer experience was stressful, so at first we thought the forgetfulness was a natural part of anxiety related to her illness.

For a long time she didn't seem to get any worse and we probably expected it to just get better eventually. But when it didn't get any better, we encouraged her to see her doctor. To make a long story short, the doctor didn't address the problem properly. At the time, we didn't realize that my mom should probably have had an advocate come with her to the doctor to make sure that the doctor understood the seriousness of the situation. We should have taken my mom by the hand and been more insistent that she get the right kind of help. But my mom didn't want to press the issue and eventually just gave up on getting help from her doctor.

Over the last year, we noticed she was getting worse. Me and my siblings started talking about what to do. The three of us seemed to have differing opinions about how serious it was. On the one hand, her memory was worse than ever, but on the other hand she was still fine taking care of herself at home (buying groceries, doing housework, etc.). Plus, our mother is a proud and stubborn lady, and as much as she disliked what was happening to her, she also approached it with a certain level of acceptance and wasn't really motivated to do anything about it.

Admittedly, us kids were humming and hawing about it too much as well. We were very worried, but didn't do much about it. Maybe we were still in denial, or we were too distracted by our own busy lives, but we should have given the problem attention sooner. I think part of it was the fact that we'd never had to deal with such a serious family issue before, and it took us awhile to get in gear and figure out what kind of responsibility we needed to take.

At the beginning of November this year my partner, AC, came to stay with my mom for 2 months while he was finishing his apprenticeship training. We live in a small town 600km away, so this was convenient. He had done this twice before, but this time he noticed how much more agitated and confused my mom was.

At this time AC and I were 3 months pregnant with our first child. Sadly, a week after he came to stay with my mom, I had a miscarriage. We were both very distraught over it, and after much discussion decided that since I was doing okay (considering the circumstances) that it he should stay focused on school and not come home to be with me. We wanted to be together during this difficult time, but I didn't think it was worth dropping out of school for it, since he was only a few weeks away from completing the program.

The news of my miscarriage sent my mother over the edge. Anything that worries her causes increased anxiety and confusion, and this made her have a serious dementia episode. Back home, I got a call from the RCMP that my mother had showed up at their station in a confused state. She was speaking complete nonsense except that she said a few things about my miscarriage and that she was scared and spoke in German most of the time. By the time I talked to her on the phone, she didn't even know why she was at the police station. I gave the officer some background information about her recent history of confusion, and he said he'd keep her there until one of my siblings could be reached to pick her up, as she couldn't be left alone. My brother came to get her and bring her to his place. In the mean time I got a hold of AC and my sister and filled them in on what happened.

This was the beginning of the journey for us all.