Somebody I Used to Know

By Wendy Mitchell with Anna Wharton.
Published by Bloomsbury.

The world could do with more Wendy Mitchells. 

When this single mother of two was diagnosed with early-onset dementia in 2014 at the age of 58, she didn’t wail “Why me?”, she thought: “There will be a way of getting back some control. There’s always a way.” 

And so there was. 

It has been four years since Mitchell noticed “a snowdrift” settling in her mind, but you only have to read the January 19 entry on her blog, Which Me Am I Today?, a droll review of this book by Billy, her daughter’s cat, to know she is still Wendy. 

Written with the help of Anna Wharton, this unusual memoir, which might well fuel your 4am fears, reveals what life inside the mind of someone wrestling with dementia really feels like. With honesty and humour, Mitchell charts the march of her disease from the first tangible sign (a stumble when out running) to being lost inside her head and “screaming to get out”. 

Between these points, the woman who once juggled rosters for hundreds of nurses at her local NHS hospital experiences her mind and body waging a brutal power struggle. One day she finds her arms refusing to turn the steering wheel right when she is driving. An attempt to wallpaper her home office ends in a slimy mess. The noise of normal street life forces her to wear earplugs. Most humiliating, her baking skills are hijacked by grey matter telling her to double the sugar in her favourite cake. “I look at the cake, broken and useless inside the bin. I have heard nothing from any doctor since my diagnosis three months ago. How can I help my daughters understand my diagnosis if I can’t understand it myself?” 

Abandoned by the NHS, and ultimately forced to leave her job after 20 years (her employer’s treatment of her is scandalous), Mitchell goes to war with her confused brain, determined to educate herself and others about a disease that affects 850,000 people in Britain. She starts a blog, joins Twitter (“it brings the outside world back in”) and becomes a spokeswoman for the Alzheimer’s Society. Her spare room is converted into a memory museum strung with pictures of her life, all named and dated and secured with brightly coloured pegs. “Dementia is nothing more than a trick of my mind, and I can outwit it if I stare at my photographs hard enough.” 

She has good days and bad days, but her doggedness sees her holding on to her ability to type fluently. She travels round the country giving talks, a typed-up speech in hand, a pink folder bulging with photographs and maps to remind her where she’s going. An iPad buzzes with alarms prompting her to eat, take pills, get off the train and remember to pick up her suitcase. “Powerless to live the way I want to...I scrape back control whenever I can.” 

It is painful to read her daily, often humiliating skirmishes with the disease. Those who are less determined, and more disorganised, would struggle to emulate her spirit and yet, for all her efforts, the government takes away her personal independence payment “for simply trying to stay out of full-time state care”. 

She is fortunate to have two remarkable daughters, the source of her resolve to delay the inevitable day when she’ll often look into their eyes and wonder who they are.

Although the writing errs towards the florid (there’re lots of “warm bubbles frothing with love” and thoughts “that evaporate like steam”), this is a book from which we can all learn. And its lessons go beyond treating those living with Alzheimer’s with less pity and more respect. (Don’t even think of calling them “sufferers” in front of this formidable woman.) 

In 2015, when Mitchell is asked to the premiere of Still Alice, a film about a woman living with early onset Alzheimer’s, its star, Julianne Moore, asks her: “How do you live your life?” “I live for the moment,” she replies. “I don’t plan any more. I just enjoy each day as it comes.” 

Her daughters recently planned a trip in a glider that took her into the sky above her Yorkshire home. “I must grab these opportunities with both hands while I can. On my way out, I spot a wing-walking poster...” 

In life, there is only the present, a truism to remind us all to be more like the future wing-walker Wendy Mitchell. 

Jackie Annesley