It was Nick Brake’s wife who started noticing changes in his memory. Nicky found her husband was forgetting things that had happened the previous day, or how to spell certain words. In 2020, she asked him to mention it at a routine check-up. But his GP told him it was nothing to worry about. It was the start of a four-year journey to reaching a diagnosis with dementia.
Two years later, with his symptoms getting worse, he returned to the doctor and was then given a brief test over the phone.
“The test really wasn’t fit for purpose – Nick was asked very basic tests including his name and date of birth, which he could easily answer and didn’t seem to be anything which would effectively test for a memory problem,” says Nicky, 59, who lives in Rutland with Nick and previously ran a charcuterie company with him.
Shorts
“Gradually, it got to the stage when some of Nick’s long-term memory also seemed to be affected – for example, he had completely forgotten what the logo of a furniture company he had run for 15 years looked like,” says Nicky, who has two adult children with Nick. “I started to worry that something was really wrong because he should have remembered things like that.”
