'Utterly catastrophic' — life with frontotemporal dementia
All In The Mind
ABC listen
4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 26 February 2022
⏱️ 29 minutes
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Summary
Frontotemporal dementia, or FTD, is tricky to pick up at the doctor's office and impossible to cure.
And for those who live with the condition, their families and their carers, the situation can be very challenging.
On All in the Mind this week, we hear from those people and a researcher who has spent decades working on the condition.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an ABC podcast. |
| 0:05.9 | I want to start by introducing you to Mark Ferguson. |
| 0:09.7 | Okay, my name is Mark. |
| 0:12.1 | I'm 69 years of age. |
| 0:14.1 | I live in Newcastle. |
| 0:15.1 | When Mark talks about his wife, Jill, it's immediately obvious how deeply he loves her, |
| 0:20.7 | and it's gorgeous to hear. |
| 0:23.0 | Before she was diagnosed with her illness, she was the gentlest, loveliest woman that you |
| 0:28.1 | would ever meet. She still is. She was also a very capable woman. She was the manager of a nursing |
| 0:35.6 | home facility, and she did an amazing job working and |
| 0:38.8 | bringing up the kids and she's just an absolute rock, the most beautiful, lovely woman you |
| 0:44.2 | would ever meet. What were the first signs or hints that something wasn't quite right? |
| 0:50.3 | In about 2012, I noticed that her speech sometimes became slurred and sometimes she mixed up her words. |
| 0:58.5 | I thought that it was, he maybe had a little too much wine and I was a bit concerned about that. |
| 1:03.6 | We had a conversation about that and that apparently wasn't the case. |
| 1:08.4 | Then after a while, she was having trouble using the right words or finding |
| 1:13.3 | the words. Some of the words she would say were not pronounced properly. It's just becoming very |
| 1:19.6 | traumatic. Her speech was going downhill. That was the beginning of a long, winding journey |
| 1:26.2 | towards a terrible terminal diagnosis, |
| 1:29.8 | frontotemporal dementia. |
| 1:32.9 | When the doctor gave us that diagnosis, I knew from his demeanour that it was not good, |
| 1:40.4 | but still had no idea the monumental effect that it was about to have on our lives |
... |
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