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Dementia is a reality that 7.7 million people worldwide will face for the first time each year and worldwide there are an estimated 47 million cases. But those are just the people who actually have the horrible disease.
No study can show the true impact of how many people are affected by dementia because the reality is that each individual diagnosed has family members who are also affected and no study can truly find that number.
Think about it. Each new case may have siblings still alive who will bear the burden of, in a sense, losing that family member. Then there are the children of the dementia patient along with their spouses, who knows how many grandchildren and extended family plus close and in many cases, lifelong, friends.
I used the term, “Losing the family member,” because in a sense, you have lost that person. It’s true that they’re still in their physical body, but their mind comes and goes. Some days they remember lots of things, while other days they won’t recognize someone they’ve known since the day they were born.
Towards the end of her life my grandmother suffered from dementia and although we have a small family—at the time just my parents, brother, sister-in-law, myself and my daughter who was 3-4 at the time my grandmother had dementia.
While I felt bad for my mom, an only child, seeing her mother in this state, the person I felt worst for was my daughter, hoping and praying that at her young age she would have no memories of her great-grandmother.
That may sound cruel, because I should have been thinking first and foremost of my grandmother, but I thought that way because I didn’t want my daughter’s memories to be of someone who was happy and loving one moment and the next, confused and even mean and downright cruel to us, the unknown people who were, “bothering” her.
Join us tonight, October 4, 2018 at 9 pm Eastern/6 pm Pacific for our weekly Mental Health Group Call where our topic will be The True Cost of Dementia. Click here to register.
I look forward to talking with you and to hearing your thoughts and tales of how dementia has touched your life.
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Photo credit: Photo courtesy Pixabay
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