If the drugs had been around then, that would have been a year that her brain was being damaged that we couldn’t have got back, no matter how good the drugs were. It took me another six months to persuade Catriona to agree to go to another expert, who finally diagnosed her. Getting a diagnosis for Alzheimer’s can take a dreadfully long time: it took me six months to persuade Catriona to go to the hospital for a diagnosis – and then they turned us away, telling us there was nothing wrong. While these drugs sound incredible, unless the process of getting a diagnosis is sped up, people won’t get their full benefit. I have to hope that the council will continue to pay for her to stay in the same place.

The care home she’s in is wonderful, but in one more year I’ll have run through our savings. When lockdown happened, a part of me almost welcomed it because no one else was able to go out either and I didn’t feel like such an outsider. My world became as small as hers – just our four walls. Catriona wasn’t safe to leave for a moment: we couldn’t risk her going into the kitchen or walking up the stairs on her own because she’d lost her sense of balance.īy that point, you can’t go out because they can’t go out. Eventually you become a full-time carer – and that really does mean 24 hours a day. She was already struggling and my reactions must have made things even scarier for her.Įverything changes when your partner has Alzheimer’s. I just thought she wasn’t concentrating and snapped at her. I still carry enormous guilt that I got angry and frustrated when Catriona forgot things, kept asking the same questions or had a blank doing something she’d done thousands of times before. One of the most awful things is the beginning, when you don’t know that there’s anything wrong.

It’s continuous you watch your loved one slowly getting worse and worse. I’ve come to terms with what’s happened to my wife, but to think that it might be possible to stop other people going through what we endured makes me very happy – especially as those other people could be my children or my friends. She’s in a home now, unable to look after herself or even speak coherently. She was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2014 when she was just 58. These drugs have come eight years too late for my wife, Catriona. Photograph: Jim Wileman/The Guardian Dave Shepherd, Devon Dave and Catriona Shepherd, pictured in 2018.

The cruellest miles