This is by no means a post to generate sympathy, this is not to be considered me "opening up" about the past 6 years of my life. I am open about them, they're not a taboo subject.
This is an attempt to voice my opinion in more than one tweet at a time and I hope you'll read on with an open mind...if you read on at all.
A little under 6 years ago my father fell gravely ill, he survived but with one major complication: he would spend the rest of his life brain damaged. Initially, we didn't know how severe this would be, how it would manifest itself or what we were going to do. (Keep in mind, it was about a month before my 13th birthday, Mam probably knew but didn't tell me. I don't blame her.)
It turned out that my father recovered physically, walking, talking. coffee drinking. cross-word completing, chocolate-eating, and giving out better than ever before.
However he suffered from dementia.
Over the next few years, I watched a man I grew up with become a stranger. I no longer knew the man who would sit in front of me at the kitchen table. I became a babysitter.
It got to the stage where I would have to stay up all night and listen to see if he would get up and walk around the house, to see if he would hurt himself, to see if he would do something like turn on the gas stove and leave it on. He genuinely did not know where he was or what he was doing. Our home turned into something akin to a prison. We were all trapped.
Shortly after I moved to college things got progressively worse. He was constantly agitated, confused, dazed, easy to anger. Not the man we knew. My mother and I could no longer care for him, we didn't have the means to do so, he was in and out of hospital, and after MONTHS of internal debate, deliberation and tears, we knew he couldn't stay at home.
A nursing home was the only thing to do. It wasn't a case of "we're sick of you, off you go, we'll visit," It was a case of extreme necessity.
Many months of paperwork, visits from people who organise these things and people who probably don't, my father finally ended up in a nursing home close to home.
At this stage, 4 and a half years had passed, he was feeble, frail and half the man he used to be. Unrecognisable from his former glory.
Here, I watched his demise. We would visit and find him alone and isolated, he had lost all his social skills. He lost all his strength.
My mother, during this time, was a trooper. She visited daily, bringing newspapers, books filled with pictures, sweets, treats, CDs, fresh aftershaves, we made conversation over topics that he didn't have to think about. We learned to phrase questions like "I don't think I told you about XYZ but..." when we had told him about it 10 minutes previously.
At one point, my mother spoonfed him yogurts as he was too weak to eat.
Tea had to be thickened because he would choke on it. Solid food was a thing of the distant past.
The last time I spoke to him, we sat down and looked at a picture book, filled with pictures of his old hometown. He told me stories, I nodded along, careful to ask questions I knew he could answer.
Over the course of 5 years I literally watched a human being rot from the inside out.
He soon lost his speech. The last full sentence I heard him speak was "give me the paw" to a therapy dog.
I don't think I can do justice to the pain caused by this disease, not only to my father but to his family.
So I definitely can't put into words how much a ~certain~ novel/film/soon to be tv series angers me.
I'm sure everyone knows what I'm talking about when I say THAT film that romanticises Alzheimer's disease.
Because I'm 100% certain that when my parents got married many years ago that my mother's idea of her future was her spoonfeeding her husband in a locked ward in a nursing home. I'm sure she couldn't wait to have her only child go through the Leaving Cert and move away to college while babysitting an Alzheimer's patient. I'm sure the most romantic thing she ever did was sign the DNR papers, alone, I adored crying myself to sleep most nights because I was loosing my father and there was nothing I could do.
I'm sure she adored meeting me off the last train home, one unforgiving January night and telling me "things aren't good inside (in the home)"
I loved seeing my father helpless and drugged, sedated.
The most fun I ever had was when we nearly crashed the car on an emergency visit to say goodbye (for the 3rd time that day) as advised by the nurses.
The greatest morning of my life was the 19th of January when my mother woke me to tell me the news.
So fuck The Notebook and fuck anyone that claims it's the "most romantic film ever" because the reality of Alzheimer's disease is the furthest thing from romantic.
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