"She knows my voice, so I’ll just keep going": AFLW star’s heartbreak over mother’s dementia
Prototype: Instagram @nicstevens21
Nicola Stevens wears more hats. Collingwood's starting time AFLW draft selection and best-and-fairest victor, and then inaugural All-Australian team member. Like a sho at Carlton Football Club, the osteopathist juggles footy breeding with being co-director at a Kensington Clinic.
But there's one hat she holds a little tighter than the rest, which is her ambassadorship for Dementia Australia, one she holds with moving veneration to her own family. Her father Ann is in her 11th year of younger onset dementia after she was diagnosed at 52.
"Mommy was diagnosed when I was 18 years old; they said she could live anywhere between quintuplet and 20 years," Stevens recalled.
At the time, having just gone finished a separation with their engender, Nicola and her elder brother Aidan knew their mum wasn't herself.
"We thought she was suffering from natural depression because we started seeing changes in her personality that weren't characteristic in the least."
"I was in the car with her one day and she just forgot the fashio home. If she was trying to cook dinner, she would often leave what order of magnitude things live in, that was a actually challenging thing for her to do.″
Ann's speech was also severely compromised.
"She would be halfway through a sentence and stop talking and say, 'I can't think what I was going to say, I can't encounte the words'."
After countless tests, it was in Nicola's final year of educate that the word "dementia" appeared.
"The diagnosis came and within three years she had lost her driver's licence, her independence, ability to cook, dress and clean herself and moved into a nursing home. IT all happened very rapidly," Stevens said.
Although the diagnosis brought some answers, an teemingness of confronting questions came besides.
"There are thusly many questions but thither's not forever answers and when we talk roughly the brain, it's thusly complex and a lot of the fourth dimension doctors don't in reality know what's going to happen, it's incompatible for everyone."
The then-teenage siblings found themselves referring to their only lived go through of dementia in the family.
"The entirely knowledge I had was that my nanna on Dad's side had had dementia and forgotten Dad's name.
"Thusly, I knew it happened to senescent people and that Uncommunicative was going to draw a blank my constitute."
The S. Smith Stevens family then embarked along the steep learning curve which an estimated 120,900 Proper families have trodden, just this year.
Also well-known as early onset dementia, it encompasses under 65-class-olds and bum descend on multitude as Loretta Young Eastern Samoa 30. That figure is estimated to rise to 301,000 people past 2058 without a portentous medical breakthrough, hence Stanley Smith Stevens' allegiance.
"Early when she was commencement diagnosed, I kept a lot to myself, I felt embarrassed that I was experiencing something that cypher else was and Dendranthema grandifloruom wasn't like everyone else's Dendranthema grandifloruom," she said.
"Friends wouldn't ask how Mum or I were because they were afraid to hear the response, so I started to access the syndicate support services at Dementia Australia."
With Ann now in the after stages of her battle, she has lost most spoken communication and walking ability, and Stevens says one of the more beta lessons has been acknowledging the day-by-day nature of their relationship.
"It looks different each time we jaw, sometimes she's too drooping and not very alert, sometimes she opens her eyes and I talk to her but sometimes I just sit there and play her music."
The nursing staff put the footy connected every week when the Blues play, so that Ann can hold fort behind the goal posts.
"Even though Mum can't talk now she give notice hear me. She knows my voice, and so I'll just keep going, I tell her everything."
"A a couple of years past I played one of her best-loved INXS songs and she just started crying and then so did I. Not because she was upset but because she could actually remember something and that was really beautiful. I was imperative because I was so happy she could feel something."
Article originally published on The Age. Republished with permit.
Source: https://hellocare.com.au/she-knows-my-voice-so-ill-just-keep-going-aflw-stars-heartbreak-over-mothers-dementia/
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