Mum never hovered over them, she left them to it. Dad was loved by his carers, who took him on walks and joked with him. He didn’t look in horror at what he had lost, or at what lay ahead.Īnd when things got worse, and he had nothing by mouth, he bonded over the PEG feeds, which his 5 year-old grandson often did for him. The blunting of his previously fine frontal cortex was a blessing. Once, long after he had a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG) tube, and fluids caused him violent coughing, he said to me with a smile that he would really like a cup of tea, but he knew he couldn’t. Mum made him dress and wash himself every day even if it took an hour or more. He fell lots, bloodied his knees and sometimes his nose, but he kept going. He went on buses to his volunteering-working for a charity promoting zero population growth (we chuckled at him having a daughter with four then five children) and he walked along the beachfront every day. Mum was incredible-against her bossy neurologist daughter’s advice she kept him doing things. The early misdiagnosis helped him-he did have some response to levodopa and he may not have been offered this if he had been correctly diagnosed. I didn’t know how we could cope with this terrible disease. I didn’t want to tell him or the family it seemed too awful to bear. I realised this was progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP). His neck was really rigid and he didn’t move his eyes. This was made all the more worrying as he was on warfarin for pulmonary emboli. He kept falling-a dramatic plunge head first into a swimming pool at a posh party in his finest clothes, stumbles and trips on a bushwalk, multiple falls backwards from ladders. Then at 64 a colleague noticed that he looked a little stiff, and he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
0 kommentar(er)
