Hello. This may be a long one.
To start with saying, my mum, my best friend, died on the 23rd, of aspiration pneumonia. This followed 5 years of doctors throwing us under a bus every time we tried to get help for her. We never got a diagnosis. We never will.
Losing someone with so many questions, is incredibly hard. We question could she have been saved, what was wrong, could it have been treated, could her life have been prolonged. She was only 68, 3 days from her 69th birthday. I feel completely robbed of her. She was absolutely failed.
We did end up seeking private help who offered us a list to approach the gp with. (They still didn’t bother). The private doctor suspected and wanted to have lewy body dementia with parkinsons investigated. We as a family now believe it was the other way round. With experience of symptoms I wonder if anyone can help me determine if this was likely. She suffered:
Mild Hallucinations, bugs on the dash board, things on the floor and cats. Early days saying plates, the hoover, glasses, were suddenly heavy. Confusion, capital letters in writing, later giving up doing anything, she’d sit in a chair all day the last year or so, she stopped eating or drinking around the same time and was fed with meal drinks, she never forgot who we were but did used to ask who washed her hair etc. Her husband. In the last couple of years she began a shuffle and more recently folding in half. She never suffered night terrors or shaking but did have myoclonic jerks. They’re the most obvious things anyway.
Thanks for reading, to anyone who got this far.
