A dad has revealed how he started experiencing symptoms for dementia while he was in his 30s.
Just 10 months ago, 41-year-old Fraser’s life got turned upside down when he was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease – although it began years before then.
Speaking in a video uploaded to his YouTube channel, I (don’t) have dementia, in January. The Australian said: “So I got diagnosed eight months ago, and I think my symptoms probably started about two/two-and-a-half years before that.
“It’s funny because I don’t remember what my symptoms really were initially, all I remember was having some pretty big memory flaws, like I remember I was sitting down to watch a movie once and my partner’s gone, ‘yeah, we watched that like a month ago’.
“Anyway, I watched the whole movie, and the ending was still a complete surprise. I had no memory of watching it whatsoever, and I didn’t watch many movies either at the time. So it was, it was a bit concerning that was.”
He continued: “It’s funny though because I don’t know if I’ve had symptoms like that again ever since – I’m not sure if that’s even my Alzheimer’s. I have no idea. It’s just something that, you know, it was like, ‘Oh, God, that’s a bit concerning’. I just remembered having sort of more, bigger memory issues like that as being the problem.
“At some point, though, I started having some issues with my cognition more generally, and I think that was more getting closer to the diagnosis, where I noticed that.
“It wasn’t until even probably just a few months before the diagnosis, I noticed that I was having issues with just thinking, being able to think deeply. I find that I have more sort of surface level thinking, more shallow thinking.”
Fraser explained that he began struggling to remember what was going on in other people’s lives when they had told him, for instance when his teenage daughters told him what they were getting up to.
It became a major concern for him when his daughter shared with him that she was going to the movie theater but he’d completely forgotten and with her not picking up her cell phone he began frantically panicking.
“I remember once, this is early on, I remember my daughter had told me numerous times throughout the day that she’d go to the movies that night and it would be sort of quite late with a friend, and it came to night time, and I started freaking out, thinking, ‘where’s my daughter?’, I was generally freaking out,” he told viewers.
“I was driving to the nearby town trying to see from other friends, if they were with, if she was with, if they’ve heard from her. And and it got to a point where I was about to ring the police, like I was that concerned.
“I’d been trying to call her, trying to phone message, trying to message her, and just not getting through to her at all. So yeah, really freaking out. And then she ends up calling me, saying, like, ‘Hey, Dad, I’ve just been in the movies. Remember, I told you?’.”
Fraser now has a system in place with his teen daughters that they now text him if they go out somewhere even if they spoke to him about it, just so he can look at his messages and remember where they went.