The husband shared his wife’s pictures who were diagnosed with advanced dementia at just 52.
The before and after pictures of his wife is so heartbreaking.
In December 2015, Gill Cardall, 56, was diagnosed with dementia a progressive non-fluent aphasia.
Her husband Dominic, 55, and their daughters Emily, 30, and Georgia, 26, watched how she lost the ability to walk, talk and eat.
When the couple celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary in 2016, Mrs. Cardall was unable to say anything.
The former Women’s Royal Navy worker needs 24-hour care now, she couldn’t eat solid food and needs a wheelchair all the time.
She can communicate only by drawing ‘squiggles’, Mr. Cardall wants to share with people that how dementia can ‘happen to anyone’ and how it has changed the woman his wife used to be.
She was looking a ‘wonderful and beautiful’ lady in her old pictures, smiling for the camera at a party, her hair glowing blonde.
The picture after dementia shows her grey-haired, her head is hanging around while strapped in a wheelchair – she holds a toy doll like a child.
Mr. Cardall, from Congleton in Cheshire, said: ‘It’s horrible really, to see that change.
‘Gill was the life and soul of any party. She was kind, thoughtful but always spoke her mind.
‘She always thought about others, never missed anyone’s birthday and loved to be the center of attention. She was a very popular lady.
‘Now, she has become a frailer version of herself. It’s as if she is slowly fading in every aspect – physically, mentally and just in who she is. It’s like she’s being erased by [dementia].
‘I’d never seen the first photograph of Gill before – it was sent to me by one of her friends who were down at a Women’s Royal Naval Service reunion this weekend.
‘It knocked me sideways really. I got quite upset. The photograph was the last time Gill went [to the reunion] four years ago. That’s what hit me. I knew how much it meant to her.
‘I thought I need to share the pictures to raise awareness and give people a kick up the backside. [Dementia] can happen to anyone.
‘Gill now needs 24-hour care, including her care and feeding. She has to have pureed food because of swallowing and choking issues.
‘Her fluids are all thickened to make them like wallpaper paste. She’s also losing a lot of weight. We can’t keep the weight on her because of her eating issues.’
Gill and Dominic got married in 1986 and they both worked for the Royal Navy in Plymouth. They left the job two years later to start a family.
They have two daughters, Emily, 30, and Georgia, 26, who also help in their mother’s care.
Both girls stayed at home when their mother first became ill, and they noticed her mother was unable to say anything.
Mr. Cardall said: ‘The first sign that anything was wrong was Gill started to have speech problems.
‘At first, we didn’t know what it was. She’d say the wrong word in a sentence or get a word mixed up.
‘It progressed over the next couple of months where she was having real problems with her speech, then her work contacted me to say she was having difficulties.
‘We saw the GP and what was flagging it up for me was Gill’s mom had Alzheimer’s and her eldest sister, Anne, had dementia.
‘Gill’s condition is a type of frontal temporal dementia. It affects the speech element of the brain. She’d get words mixed up or couldn’t find the right word.
‘For example, she asked me to ‘get her handbag out of the carton’. She didn’t realize she wasn’t saying a car.
‘That was one of the things I realized she was adamant about. It wasn’t a slip of the tongue.
‘We always called the TV remote control the ‘zapper’. But she would say ‘can you pass me, that teleprinter thing’.
‘She’d say ‘I’d like a cup of hot water with a bag in it’, rather than a cup of tea.
‘Her brain was trying to work things out but getting them wrong, or mixed up.’
His ‘kind, loving’ wife had started to become ‘less empathetic’ and when their girls came home with good exam results, Mrs. Cardall failed to react.
Her husband said: ‘Pretty early on we thought something along those lines [of dementia] was happening.
‘Her personality started to change too. She became less empathetic. She was always the most kind, loving person you could ever meet.
‘I remember one of the girls came in and they’d passed something, an exam or a test, and Gill was completely blank about it.
‘She also became very sharp with people, as if her inhibitions had gone completely. We’d go to a cafe and Gill would shout the waiter ‘coffee, coffee!’
‘That was not her, so we knew something had gone wrong.’
He said: ‘If you think there’s a change in your speech or personality, get to the doctor’s straight away. People need to push.
‘In groups, I’m in [online], so many people have said their loved ones were diagnosed with depression or anxiety before being diagnosed with a form of dementia.
‘There’s a lot of misdiagnoses – especially with the rarer forms of dementia. I found a lot of information on Alzheimer’s UK website.
‘I know they say you shouldn’t self diagnose things, but the symptoms we had were spot on.
‘The other really good help, because of Gill’s age, was YoungDementia UK, because there’s hardly anything out there for people with young-onset dementia.
‘Everything is focused on older people and this is why I want to raise awareness.
‘The groups that are held by charities are all sing-along groups or coffee mornings and focused on older people.
‘Gill loved music but she didn’t like Vera Lynn, she wanted to listen to Rick Astley. There’s a hole in the whole system.’
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