Marie Therese Webb had only just put the phone down on a call to her mother Maeve when seconds later, she rang again.
Marie Therese assumed her mother had forgotten to tell her something important.
‘Instead, Mum began repeating the exact conversation we’d had just five minutes before,’ says Marie Therese, 46.
‘I realised that she hadn’t remembered that we had literally just spoken.’
It was another instance of what the family had called Maeve’s ‘forgetfulness’.
‘Mum would go out shopping for food and return with nothing for dinner, or forget the names of old friends,’ recalls Marie Therese.
‘She started to lose weight, too, dropping from a dress size 14 to an eight.
'I realise now that she was probably forgetting to eat.’
Maeve’s memory lapses had crept up on her slowly over the previous two years.
Her husband John had put it down to getting older, but Marie Therese began to suspect it was something else.
‘Mum was only in her late 60s but it began to dawn on me that these episodes were getting more frequent and we couldn’t pretend they weren’t happening any more,’ says Marie Therese, who runs a PR business and lives in Belfast with her husband Patrick, 46, a builder, and their three children, Tess, 16, Tom, 14 and Poppy, ten.
Shortly afterwards, in November 2009, Maeve saw her GP and was referred to a specialist. Memory tests confirmed she had Alzheimer’s disease.
‘We’d been in denial about how bad her problems were, so it was devastating to get the diagnosis,’ says Marie Therese.
‘The only treatment they could offer was the drug Aricept to slow down her decline for a few months.
She was immediately told to stop driving and it was clear that all our lives were about to change dramatically.
‘I’m an only child, so shortly afterwards Patrick and I took the decision to move back from London to Belfast to be closer and help Dad look after her.
'I didn’t want her going into a home.’
Now 75, Maeve is still living in her own home, cared for by her husband, Marie Therese and a team of helpers. But the former buyer for C&A is a pale shadow of herself, recognising no one and virtually immobile.
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