What My Father’s Vascular Dementia Diagnosis Taught Me About What We Can Control

Hello, Mere here. Happy Sunday.

I woke up this morning ready to go, which felt a little ironic given that daylight saving time technically stole an hour from all of us last night. In truth it was adrenaline. If you have been following along the last couple of weeks, you know why. I am going to be honest about that.

Which is actually a funny segue into what I have been sitting on. Funny in that it is not funny at all. But stay with me.

If you read my newsletter two weeks ago, the one about falling apart, about the snotty tears and the rescheduled calls and the business partner who had a plane ticket ready to go the second I said the word, then you already know some of this. You know I flew internationally in the middle of something enormous. You know it had to do with my father. What you don’t know is what happened on February 14th.

My father paused at a green light. A stranger noticed something was wrong and came to his window. The police were called. When they asked him who he was, where he was, where he lived. He did not know and failed every question asked. This was a man I had spoken to 48 hours earlier. Saucy as ever. Even hung up on me in true Ron fashion.

It was at that moment, at the traffic light, that my sister was called and I booked a flight. My newsletter two weeks ago discussed what happened next, as my sister and I, in record speed, got him safe, and navigated everything that comes with that: the estate, the legal conversations, finding a memory care unit, getting him medically transported across 3 states...etc, etc..

Since that day, he has been declining rapidly. And in the weeks that have followed ,the hospital, the facility, the conversations that no family wants to have ....I have not been foggy or lost. If anything, the opposite. I have been laser focused. Eyes wide open. Hyper alert in a way that I think only happens when something forces you to see clearly whether you are ready to or not.

What I keep coming back to is this: dementia does not arrive on a Saturday out of nowhere. It was there and progressing. For years. In the forgetting of words, the repeated questions, the stories told twice in the same conversation. Authorities in his life (not myself or family) chalked it up to aging. To distraction. To just being human. To which yes, aging is part of being human. Nobody who he deemed of authority (read that again) had a conversation with him about what was quietly building, suggestions for caring for himself preventatively. Not that he would have listened, but I am hoping YOU will.

This is one of the most important things I want you to understand about dementia: it does not begin the day you notice it. Research consistently shows that the neurological and vascular changes underlying dementia can be accumulating silently for ten to twenty years before a 'diagnosis' is made. In my father’s case, the changes were mild: some forgetfulness, occasional confusion around technology, nothing that screamed crisis to him or his providers even years ago. And then, seemingly overnight, a switch got turned off. There is a possibility that a TIA (a transient ischemic attack, sometimes called a mini-stroke) played a role in that sudden shift. His scans and MRI came back with nothing remarkable. But that is also consistent with how vascular disease in the brain can present: cumulative, quiet damage that conventional imaging does not always capture until significant function has already been lost. By the time most families are having the hard conversations, the window for meaningful prevention has long passed. That is not to induce guilt or despair. It is to make the case, urgently, for why this conversation matters right now, before there is a crisis to respond to.

That is the conversation I want to have with you today. And I want to have it not just as someone watching her father decline, but as someone who has felt cognitive disruption in her own body.

Because here is what I know from the reach-outs I have received since writing that newsletter: I am not the only one in this. Messages from people watching a parent forget their own name. People navigating a diagnosis alone, fielding calls from facilities, making decisions that you weren’t ready to make yet. People who recognized themselves in what I wrote because they are also holding something they have not told anyone about yet. You are not alone. And more importantly, for your own sake, for your parents, for the people coming behind you, there is so much that is within your reach.

When I was induced into surgical menopause, it was roughly two years in, still very much in the thick of it, that I started experiencing something I had never experienced before in my life: stuttering. Word recall that simply was not there. Braining was hard. Thinking required so much effort. Reaching for a word mid-sentence and finding nothing. Nobody explained it to me. I was lucky (?)...It was my own education and understanding that allowed me to connect what was happening. (this is why I am sooooo PASSIONATE about edcuating!) Estrogen withdrawal does not just make some women sweaty and give them something to use as a punch line of a joke... It affects the brain. Profoundly. In fact that temperature regulation, sleep disturbance, mood shifts. These are effects from the brain. My situation was different than my father’s but the territory (the disorientation of feeling like your brain is no longer fully yours) is something I understand more personally than I ever expected to. It is part of why the hormones section of this blog matters as much as it does.

Now. I need you to read what comes next....

I know you don’t want to.....

Nobody wants to sit down and think about cognitive decline. Nobody wants to think about wills, power of attorney, executors, estates, facilities, the hard conversations that no family is ever truly ready for. I get it. I am living it right now and I would give almost anything not to be.

But I am asking you anyway.

Read this.

Please!

Not because I am offering you a guaranteed cure, not because I have a protocol that eliminates risk fully, but because what I can give you is information. Things you can do right now, today, that build a different future. Things that are in your hands.

We are talking cardiovascular training, muscle mass, blood sugar, thyroid, hormones and HRT, sleep, and why most people are not thinking about any of these things in the context of their brain. But they should be. And after today, you will be.

And honestly? How powerful is that. Not “I can fix this” but “I am doing the absolute best I can.”

That is not a small thing. That is everything.

So read on.

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