Christopher B.A. (Battling Alzheimer’s)

Tuesday, January 6, 2025.

Day 1. Well, here goes. My first diary entry since the diagnosis.

Write things down in a notebook, they said, so that you will remember the details on the days when you can’t remember.

That made me laugh. I spent forty five years as a journalist, informing other people of the latest news.

Forty five years of witnessing cruelty, crime, heartbreak, tragedy and sometimes - just sometimes - the nicer side of humanity.

Forty five years of memories and now this damned condition was slowly taking all of it away from me.

And now I’m writing notes - for me. Notes to inform me about myself. Notes to keep me in touch with a past that is fading.

How has it come to this? Why me. Why in God’s name, me? Have I done something wrong? Am I being punished?

It’s as if I have my own reset button, just like that guy in Groundhog Day, except his dreams came true eventually and he finally stopped reliving the same day over and over again.

My nightmare goes on forever. Why me?

I wonder if I should write a headline above each entry in my ‘reset diary’.

BREAKING - Christopher to take an iron tablet at 6am. Hmmm not sure it works.

BREAKING - Christopher to remember to have breakfast.

Note to self. Put the bins out on a Thursday. That made me smile as well. I could never remember to do that before I had dementia.

Wednesday, January 7.

Day 2. I had to read yesterday’s diary note to remember about the bins. And to remember I have got Alzheimer’s.

I think I prefer that description of it, Alzheimer’s. Dementia seems so painful. So permanent, so goddamn annoying.

It makes me feel like people are staring at me and saying ‘look at him. He’s got dementia. We better cross the road.’

There are times when I am not even sure I have Alzheimer’s. I can remember events from 1960 like it was yesterday.

Flowerpot Men, Watch With Mother. I remember them well.

I just can’t remember anything from yesterday. As if someone got inside my head and put up a roadblock on my brain.

They did all the tests and I do have Alzheimer’s but they think they can control it with tablets. They put them in a box with each day of the week on them in bright colours.

I have to remember to take them.

I wonder what happened to that guy down the street. I heard his wife had Alzheimer’s.

Why me?

I hate this life. It will probably be the same thing tomorrow and every day after that. It will be a life where I spend the first hour of every day reading the reset diary. Reading about the things I ought to know. The things I knew yesterday after reading the diary, but then came the reset.

I have taken the medication they prescribed. Five tablets on a morning.

Have to take them every morning until I rattle.

They say it will delay the symptoms. Maybe it does but it can’t delay the horribly dark fear that my mind is vanishing - disappearing in a slow, painful and heartbreaking crawl towards nothingness.

Dr Pargeter, or Park, or maybe it was Parker. Whoever. Anyway, a very nice man with a Scottish lilt, told me ‘you’ll be surprised at how well you adapt and learn to cope.’

Well, he didn’t exactly tell me. He told my daughter. I just happened to be in the same room.

It was as if he was speaking to a pet owner about their playful puppy.

I felt like saying ‘I am in the room you know!’ Or maybe I’m not in the room.

Maybe my shell of a body is in the room but my mind, my being, my soul has gone.

Note to self. Bring the empty bins back in.

Thursday, January 8.

Day 3. Note to self. Remember to put the rubbish in the bins when you take them out. So close yet so far from getting it right. Why me?

Friday, January 9.

Day 4. I saw my son today. I didn’t realise it, but apparently I asked him exactly the same questions I asked him the last time he came to see me.

‘Do you ever see that man who used to live in our street?’

‘Mam, you ask me that each week. And each week, I remind you that he died five years ago.’

I remind him that I have Alzheimer’s. I do that every week as well, he says. We laughed about it. He’s a good boy.

Note to self - Remember to eat something at teatime. I forgot yesterday. I forgot that I had a lovely tuna salad in the fridge that my daughter had made.

She’s a good girl. I asked her about the man who used to live down the street. She couldn’t remember.

Saturday, January 10.

Day 5. Note to self. Don’t ask son about that guy who lived down the street. It seems to make him annoyed but I don’t know why.

Note to self. The carer comes at 9. Get them to help around the house and do the jobs my money is paying them for - instead of me keeping them talking for an hour, just because I am lonely.

10pm. I think I’ve done it. By God I’ve done it! I have remembered everything I needed to remember for tomorrow. The reset diary really helped.

Note to self. You did so well today. Sleep well.

Sunday, January 11.

Day 6. Woke up early with something on my mind. Was I supposed to have remembered something?

I looked at the diary and realised that it had a list of all the things I knew yesterday. All the things I had forgotten. All the things I would have to teach myself again.

I knew there was something I should have remembered.

So close and yet so damn far.

Why me?

Note to self. Ask my son if he remembers what happened to that nice man who lived down the street.