A stranger to oneself

Wendy Mitchell was diagnosed with dementia at the age of 58, three years ago. At the time, she was a non-clinical team leader in the NHS, managing rosters for hundreds of nurses and keeping much of the information stored in her head. She lived in York and had brought up two much-loved daughters on her own. She was clearly efficient, organised and independent. Mitchell realised something was wrong when, after a series of falls, she experienced a distinct lack of energy (she had been a keen runner and walker): a ‘fog’ in her head. The diagnosis was slow — her GP initially told this fit and able woman that ‘there comes a time when we all have to admit to ourselves that we’re just slowing down’ — but it was confirmed after a series of visits to a neurologist and various scans and memory tests.

Somebody I Used to Know, written with the help of the journalist Anna Wharton, is Mitchell’s memoir of her life after diagnosis, a record of how she spends her days, and her thoughts, emotions and fears. At first, she felt abandoned by doctors:

I have heard nothing from any doctor since my diagnosis three months ago, nothing but one appointment at the memory clinic…How can I help my daughters understand my diagnosis if I can’t understand it myself? That’s what I feel angry about. That’s why I feel broken and abandoned, discarded by an NHS that I have worked in for 20 years…

Mitchell, however, was determined to adapt to her changing circumstances, finding ways round problems, being positive and not letting dementia win. For example, she lost the ability to follow plots of new films, so she watched those she had seen dozens of times before:

Not that I can remember what happens — it’s always a surprise at the end — but I feel a certain familiarity throughout, a sense of the ending, even if I don’t remember the details.