Retired psychiatrist Daphne Wallace talks about how she feels after recently being diagnosed with early onset vascular dementia. Dr Wallace was diagnosed at only 65 after she noticed that some of the symptoms she was beginning to show were those which she had previously diagnosed in some of her patients.
She says: “I noticed that when I was working as a psychiatrist about 50% of my patients had dementia.
-I knew that some things I was not doing very well were things that I had diagnosed in some of my patients.”
Although her actual day to day memory wasn’t so obviously affected, Dr Wallace says that there were very specific skills which she had recognised that she had lost, such as not being able to do arithmetic any more and having difficulty remembering things visually.
“One of the important things is for people to recognise that deterioration in your condition is the significant thing.”