Hansard

I congratulate Sandra White on securing this debate and those in the gallery who have stayed this long.

I note what Jeremy Balfour said about 90,000 people suffering from dementia. However, I want to talk about only one case.

Unfortunately, as we get older, we sometimes see our friends succumbing to dementia. It is a dreadful, slow killer of personality. The first time that I noticed that a friend of mine was behaving slightly differently was when we were listening to jazz. She was semi-detached from it and smiled at all the wrong places. I thought that she was perhaps slightly deaf.

The second time that I noticed that she was behaving slightly differently was when I was having brunch in her house and they tried to make me talk politics against my will. She served up her home-made soup and forgot the cutlery. I did not really think much of that at the time but, gradually, other things happened. One day, when we were on the bus, she turned to me and said, “Christine, I’ve forgotten where you live.”

Dementia ate away at her a bit at a time. The blessing for her was that she was not distressed or aggressive; rather, she became childlike. When she did not remember where I lived, I simply said, “That’s okay. I’ll take you to it. That’s all right.” I just took it as it was.

She used to be a wonderful watercolour painter. I have some of her watercolours in my house. One Christmas, a few months before she died, she came to my house, and I said to her, “These are your paintings.” She said, “Are they?” and just smiled.

There was a funny side to it. All her life, she drank only wine. When I offered her husband, who was also a good friend of mine, a whisky, she said, “I’ll take one of those, too.” It was a great big whisky. Obviously, she had forgotten that she was only a wine drinker. However, that was the only light bit of it.

I did not see the bit when her good husband contained her behaviour in the bungalow and in the back garden, where they used to play tennis on a big lawn that they kept for that purpose. Her husband managed to cover up her behaviour and support her right up until the week before she died. She had to be put in a care home only then, and he found that very difficult.

The other tragedy for that friend of mine was that her mother suffered from dementia, too. Years before, she had said to me, “Christine, I hope what happened to my mother never happens to me.” I said, “Och, that’ll never happen to you,” but there it was. That is one story of one man and one woman and how dementia affected her.

The condition makes some people very aggressive. Recently, I went to a meeting in Midlothian of carers and their partners or husbands or wives who suffer from dementia. I met a woman there who I have known for a long time and who had been involved with me in a political campaign. She did not have the same politics as me, but the campaign was to save a community centre. I did not notice the dementia that was eating away at her at the time—her husband had to tell me that she was suffering. She said to me, “I’ve got dementia, Christine.” She became more and more aggressive as she picked up all the cups and saucers and piled them up while tidying everything up. I could see the aggression building up in her. Her personality had changed in a different way.

In that group, those with dementia were assessed while they were there but, after half an hour, the carers went into a room together, and I sat in with them. Nobody said much, but one woman began to talk about her husband and what she had to do, but she could not continue. Later, I got an email about it, which I will not share with members, because I do not like doing that kind of thing. However, I later saw that woman escorting her husband into the car like a child and taking his hand and I realised that, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, she never has a moment to herself, apart from that little bit of respite.

It is absolutely right that we talk about the numbers, but we really must address the variance in how the condition attacks people. When someone has nobody to care for them, I do not know how they manage, but we really must support the carers who do that work day in and day out, and often discreetly.