Early Signs of Gabi’s Dementia

It was in Mexico City around 2015 when the first symptoms started, though we didn’t know they were signs.

I used to ask him for help understanding certain sentences in the articles I was translating, but his answers didn’t make sense to me. And he didn’t remember much of what I told him, but he remembered the scores of all the football games and the records of all the football players.

I was frustrated. Communicating was nearly impossible. I thought it was a cultural thing, or a language thing, or a couples thing, or that he just didn’t care what I was saying enough to pay attention or remember. Since he knew all the sports scores and names and rankings it seemed he cared more about sports than about me.

During our time in Mexico City he withdrew all of his retirement fund and spent it, then went into debt, quite a bit into debt, without my knowing for over two years.

One day we were crossing a main street in Mexico City, a 6-lane street with a lot of fast-moving traffic and the Metrobus passing along the middle of it all.

I always insisted on crossing at the traffic light. But one time as I was about to step up onto the curb after crossing the street a bicyclist came close to hitting me. He said how unsafe it is to cross at the traffic light and refused to do that again, always wanting to cross in the middle of the block. I tried over and over to explain to him that the probability of getting hit by a bicyclist, even though it almost happened, was much less than getting hit by a car or the bus on a high-traffic main street with a lot of fast-moving buses and cars. He refused to accept that logic.

When we moved to Cuernavaca in 2018, I noted how stressed out he was getting after driving the granddaughter to her weekly class across town, and I asked him to stop making those trips. I had no idea why he got so stressed out. But I knew that it wasn’t good for him. And his daughter-in-law mentioned to me that she started to notice that he would tell the same stories over and over when he took her and the granddaughter to her classes.

When we finally decided something really was wrong was in early 2020 when his gall bladder burst and he ended up in the emergency surgery. He was in the hospital for several days, and kept calling his sons by his brothers’ names. Sure, being in the hospital, the anesthesia and the trauma had something to do with that. But he was only 66 at the time. It seemed that he shouldn’t have been that confused.

After seeing a psychiatrist and psychologist who are top in the field of dementia, he was finally diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia semantic variant, a type of frontal temporal dementia (FTD). And it turns out, according to the doctors, those experiences that happened in Mexico City roughly 9 years ago were typical of dementia. Right down to suddenly spending a lot of money.

They told him to stop working, that the stress would make his symptoms worse (he had already lost two long-time clients because of the poor quality of his work). And the doctors also suggested he stop driving. It was too much information to process to quickly, reason why he almost hit a motorcyclist who was stopped right in front of us. “What were you thinking about?” I asked. “Didn’t you see him?” He said yes, but he was thinking about the turn that he had to make a little further up the road.

After taking several cognitive and physiological tests, he was diagnosed in November of 2020, just coming up on four years now. It’s been a long four years. First the pandemic, which had the two of us held up in the apartment without seeing others for two years. Then his dementia got to the point at which he didn’t like to go out anymore, since he could barely have a conversation.

Fortunately for his academic education and long-time career as a translator, writer and editor, because he was always working with language he was able to compensate for his deficit for quite a long time. So much so that when the doctors saw his MRI, they were surprised that his disease was so advanced at the time of diagnosis. They had not seen someone with that much disease who could function so well.

They call that “reserve.” But eventually the reserve runs out. At some point, it is not possible to compensate anymore and the symptoms take over at an alarmingly quick rate. 

By some expert accounts, there are seven stages to this disease, and Gabi is entering the sixth stage. Each stage goes more quickly than the one before. Life expectancy? They say on average 8 to 12 years from diagnosis. Given how late in the disease he was diagnosed, going by stages seems to be more accurate, if we want to know. The doctors suggest we stay in the present and not think about what’s coming. Maybe that’s best. But being prepared is another alternative.

So here is where our lives part to a large extent. He now needs to follow his path to the end of this disease, and I need to figure out what it means to keep living.

In case you are wondering what the difference is between the mind aging and dementia, I leave you with this video below by my favorite online dementia expert, Teepa Snow.

But before you leave, please consider helping us with a donation to cover the part of his care that I am unable to afford for his first two years in the nursing home.