Story of my father, fronto-temporal dementia

Published on October 26, 2021
Author : Shoshin

My wife asked me to tell you about my father and his disease. My father suffers from frontotemporal dementia, which is rarer than Alzheimer's. It attacks less the memory than the behavior at first, knowing that it is the front of the brain that is attacked first.

My father has always been "very special" because of his bipolarity and other behavioral traits, but I understood with this disease that it was something else, he said everything, but really everything without any filter and the actions were immediately executed, in short hardly thought, without discernment

The first major element was the day my mother called in secret from their home, he had decided that she had to listen to the television on a loop without interruption if she ever closed her eyes even a little, he threatened her with violent reprisals, she had tried to approach the authorities in secret but no one wanted to believe her, no one wanted to help her, thanks to the state, so she called me for help

To help her, I made my father believe that my wife needed help planting flowers in front of our house (I live in an apartment, it's absurd) and he believed her (sometimes you need a touch of the absurd to deal with the absurd). 

I talked with him for hours and he told me crazy stories and we left and years of more intense nightmares started from there

Unknowingly, my mother had started a forced stay with me for a few months, but at least she was safe, for now.

As soon as we got home, it took a few days and I managed to convince him to go to the emergency room not for his illness but for a so-called heart attack he thought he was having

When he arrived at the hospital, of course he didn't have a heart attack but was in psychosis and our doctors gave him pills without any follow up, what had to happen happened. I will spare you for now the crisis I had to face alone afterwards and the fact that I also inherited a cat.

Since telling this kind of story takes a lot of energy, I will try to tell you other things another time.

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