I'm Diane Kessler. I spent thirty-two years as a hospital pharmacist at a county hospital in the Midwest, most of it in the basement pharmacy, and the last four years running brown-bag medication reviews at the senior centre on Elm Street.
My mother died with vascular dementia. Blood pressure and a fall, the things that could have been caught earlier. I keep the notes here that her family did not have.
I do not diagnose anyone, I do not give doses, and I do not name brands or remedies. When I have a figure it comes with its source. My husband Walt says I could find a pill bottle in a haystack, and he is not wrong.
What I hold to: check the medicine cabinet before you suspect dementia; hearing is memory; what is written down is remembered; one change at a time, and six weeks to judge it; ask the pharmacist — she has more time than the doctor; ordinary forgetting has a shape, and so does the other kind.