A father diagnosed with younger-onset dementia has provided a truly shocking update eight months on.
Receiving such a diagnosis is always going to be a life-changing event, particular in the case of Australian dad Fraser, who was just 41 when the supposed cause of his worrying symptoms was discovered.
Fraser was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, thereafter starting a YouTube cannel, Younger Onset Dementia, to talk about his journey and document his fight with the disease.
“So I got diagnosed eight months ago, and I think my symptoms probably started about two/two-and-a-half years before that,” he explained in a video.
“It’s funny because I don’t remember what my symptoms really were initially, all I remember was having some pretty big memory flaws, like I remember I was sitting down to watch a movie once and my partner’s gone, ‘yeah, we watched that like a month ago’.
“Anyway, I watched the whole movie, and the ending was still a complete surprise. I had no memory of watching it whatsoever, and I didn’t watch many movies either at the time. So it was, it was a bit concerning that was.”
And forgetting the movies he’d seen wasn’t the full extent of it. Fraser also revealed that he’d once gone looking for his daughter in the town where they live, only for it to transpire that she’d already told him she was going to the cinema.
When the symptoms became impossible to ignore, Fraser sought medical tests. Ultimately, after seeing a number of specialists, he was eventually given his surprise dementia diagnosis.
Yet even the diagnosis itself failed to compare to the shock of what he would experience less than a year later. Taking to his YouTube channel, Fraser explained he had visited doctors for a scan… only to then be told that he doesn’t have Alzheimer’s at all.
With Fraser reportedly having done extremely well in the cognitive tests, his puzzled doctors sent him for further tests.
“I had a bit of a decline in my cognition in some areas uh but not as much as what -you know- not to the extent that you would expect for somebody with Alzheimer’s over the past 12 months,” Fraser told his channel.
After more testing, the 41-year-old dad was told categorically that he didn’t have Alzheimer’s disease. Rather, it was his mental health that led to his diagnosis.
Fraser said: “I know all along I have said I don’t want this to be mental health. Yeah. But it’s mental health.”
Doctors explained to him that his “anxious brain has problems filing memories essentially like in a filing cabinet.”
Fraser clarified that said memories aren’t filed in a “logical way”, meaning he couldn’t retrieve certain memories when required.