Thai green vegetable curry with jasmine rice

Today was The Day: mum’s memory assessment. Apparently I was wrong when I said we had been waiting over a year, as the assessor told us that the referral wasn’t sent until October last year, so they had got to us in just under a year. She sounded a little proud of this fact.

A couple of months ago, I bought – at the suggestion of one of you – a whiteboard on which every evening I note what’s happening the next day, often with a little drawing that I then have to explain to mum. The explanation is needed not because of mum’s cognitive issues, but because of my inability to draw recognisable objects. (At least on a small whiteboard with markers.)

Despite this, mum forgot all about our scheduled visitor, which was probably a good thing as it meant panic had no time to build. The assessor was really lovely, and very thorough, noting down things about my late sister, and about my condition, which don’t seem to have any bearing on mum’s situation but that might be relevant later.

Mum really struggled with many aspects of the assessment: apparently there are five areas of memory / thinking that can be affected by dementia (which we’re all pretty sure is what it is, even if we don’t yet have a formal diagnosis to that effect), and mum showed problems with all of them.

At one point, we seemed to have fallen into that old Two Ronnies sketch about answering the question before last:

• Assessor: what day is it today?
• Mum: I don’t know, sorry.
• Assessor: what month is it?
• Mum: Thursday, I think?
• Assessor: ooo-kay, what about the season?
• Mum: I’m pretty sure it’s August. I don’t think it’s September yet so yes, definitely August.

Anyway, the outcome was that mum scored 42 out of a possible 100, which the assessor said is a very clear “there are problems here”. The results of the assessment will now be reviewed by a consultant, along with the rest of mum’s medical records, and we’ll either get a diagnosis or a referral for further tests. The assessor was pretty sure she knew what the diagnosis would be, but of course isn’t able to tell us as it would just be her opinion (albeit one based on extensive experience) rather than a formal diagnosis.

I started to look up different types of dementia, how they manifest and are diagnosed, and the prognosis for each, but I found myself wanting to cry so went back to join mum in a mutual act of playing ostrich and hiding our heads in the sand. (Not that ostriches actually do that, btw: they lie down with their neck stretched out so their body looks like just another bush. Victorian explorer-types¹ misunderstood what they were seeing and failed to engage their brains to realise that, by putting yourself in a position where you can’t see predators but they can see you, you might as well put up a sign saying “free dinner here!” But it coined a phrase that’s too useful to be discarded just because it doesn’t make sense from an ornithological pov. But I have digressed, not for the first or last time.

For dinner I cooked a Thai green curry, using a Simply Cook recipe box. Mum thought it was a bit spicy (but enjoyed the flavour), I thought it needed more spice, which is about as good a compromise as I’m likely to get.

Afterwards mum had some of her beloved coffee ice cream, and I treated myself to some chocolate hazelnut ice cream from Hackney Gelato (available from Tesco, and probably other supermarkets), which is very rich and very chocolatey, with pieces of crunchy hazelnut and ribbons of chocolate sauce, and utterly delicious.

Shortly it will be time for mum and I to retreat to our individual rooms, then sleep and hope that by tomorrow… idk. That by tomorrow something, anyway. 🤷‍♂️

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1. I’m guessing about the explorers, but the rest of this is entirely true. ↩︎