"Alzheimer's robbed me of my beloved mum"

SITTING with her mum in a North Swindon care home, Amanda Franks knows the woman she has loved all her life will never be the same again.

Amanda has watched her mum, Cathy Davidson, slowly deteriorate after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when she was just 58 years old.

Cathy stayed at home for as long as she could but now, aged 64, she is living in a care home where she paces the corridors and has started struggling to form sentences.

Amanda, 39, of Oakhurst, said: “Have you ever looked at a person who you have known and loved all your life and wondered where they went? I have.”

“Alzheimer’s is the longest and cruellest death ever. We will be looking after somebody who looks like mum but isn’t mum for many years to come.

“I have watched my mum turn from the centre of our family to a compliant shell of her former self, wandering the corridors of a care home. Being only 64 her physically healthy body is likely to go on for many more years. That’s a really hard way to live and not the way she would have wanted it to be.”

There are around 500,000 people in the UK living with Alzheimer's (two-thirds of all dementia cases). Cathy is one of the five per cent diagnosed under the age of 65.

At first, Cathy’s family thought she was suffering from depression, and Amanda booked an appointment for her to see a doctor.

“I was expecting depression, but the depression is actually a symptom of dementia. The fog was coming down for her,” said Amanda, who is mother to 11-year-old Daniel.

Further tests at the memory clinic at Great Western Hospital revealed Cathy was suffering from mild cognitive impairment. About a year later, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

“Mum was really matter of fact about it when she got the diagnosis. She said ‘what will be, will be’ and just lived with it,” said Amanda.

Cathy started taking medication to stall the development of the disease, which worked until about September last year.

“She could function and hold conversations.

“Life was fairly okay, and we picked up where she fell down,” said Amanda.

“But in September, it became noticeable that there was a progression again. It was between then and January it seemed like she just dropped off a cliff.

“The medication couldn’t hold her and was making her fearful of everything around her. She was hallucinating and when she watched TV she believed the people were in her house.

“She kept saying she wanted to go home but she was home.

“She went to Tenerife with my dad and some of our family. In the early hours of the morning she was shouting ‘help, help get me out of here. He is keeping me prisoner’. The police came out and my dad had to try to explain what was happening.

“When they were back home, at one point she hit my dad with a shoe while he was sleeping, and some nights she would be up in the night packing suitcases for holidays they weren’t going on.”

Things came to a head when Amanda returned from a Christmas trip in December.

“I was surprised when I came back how much she had deteriorated and how tired my dad was caring for her,” said Amanda.

“Her violence was getting out of hand and there were several points where my dad was phoning me saying ‘I need help, she’s kicking off’.

“In one breath my dad was saying she needed to stay at home and in another he was saying he couldn’t cope anymore.”

The family got her a place in a nursing home, which Cathy has now left, where Cathy was desperately unhappy and her condition became worse.

“As soon as she went into care she became more lucid, which made her upset and want to go home. She was saying ‘how could you do this to me? Why have you put me in here? It was the most traumatic time ever,” said Amanda.

“All she would do was cry. She would hang on to my dad as he left.”

Cathy’s consultant recommended she come off the medication that was keeping the Alzheimer’s from progressing as it had run its course and was now making her fearful.

“Taking her off her medication meant we were losing her even more but from her perspective she was happier,” said Amanda.

Desperate to find her a more suitable care home, the family kept searching and found her a place at Orchid Care Home in Haydon End.

“We are really lucky we found Orchid care home, you get the feeling the staff are like part of the family,” said Amanda.

“Mum is worse now than she has ever been. She is always pleased to see us but I don’t know if she knows what home is anymore.

“She’s starting to lose the ability to form sentences. Most of what she talks about makes no sense. If she smiles, you smile and if she laughs, you laugh. She becomes more and more childlike every day.

“She also paces the corridors. When you walk into that environment and see somebody who should be in the prime of their life wandering the corridors looking lost in their own world, you realise just how much we need to find a cure for Alzheimer’s.”

• HER experience has inspired Amanda, who owns Frankly Recruitment in Kembrey Park, to raise funds for Alzheimer’s Research UK by organising a gig for all generations at the Oasis on November 8.

Amanda, who is hoping the event will raise £10,000 for Alzheimer’s Research, has secured about £6,000 in sponsorship but still needs to secure about £14,000 to make the event a success.
She thanked Swindon solicitors Hoffman Male for being her main sponsor, and she is hoping more businesses will come forward.

The event, called The Gig to Remember, will feature The Bootleg Beatles, who have appeared at Glastonbury six times, as well as doing several world tours and numerous radio and TV appearances.  They will be supported by Duke Beatbox from Cheltenham.

Tickets went on sale on June 1. If you would like to help with sponsorship, expertise or donation please get in contact with Amanda Franks at amanda@thegigtoremember.com or call her on 01793 294061. For more information or tickets visit www.facebook.com/thegigtoremember or www.thegigtoremember.com/.