Sadly, yes, I think it could have. According to the research, changes in the brain occur many years, even decades before the symptoms of dementia are noticeable. What we may have thought of as annoying, a bit unusual, or odd at the time, may have been subtle signs of brain changes.
Oh, yes, how many times did I complain to my girlfriends that "he just doesn't listen to me". Little did I know he just wasn't processing. That was ten years ago and the official diagnosis only came two years ago.
Yes, Our neurologist told us that if someone is killed say in a car accident or dies suddenly and an autopsy is done, the evidence of AD can be seen as much as 20 years before the first symptoms can appear. This is truly scary. After learning this, I would say my DH was showing symptoms something was wrong as early as 1980 when he retired at age 50 from the Marine Corps. We moved in the summer to Yuma and I was the one who has always done all the electronics with the TV and stero systems. Later the non stop remote control channel checking started that has driven me nuts, then there was the computer..neither of us had one in the house until 2000. I always wanted one but he said no....and I didn't fight it though I needed to have one,,they were just soooooo costly then. Anyway, he never got the hang of just turning it on and getting to the email let alone learning the web browser...he kept saying " I really need to get on that " but then would bow out saying he didn't want to get addicted to it...then the cell phone..my god this man flew jets and could not get this and I even remarked about it...but I did not see the fire in the smoke.
No question about it. My husband was the ideal father and mate-or at least I thought so. Now that he is gone my kids tell me of his actions while they were growing up. I remember a co worker telling me my husband was a bastard to work with and that was 30 years ago. His psychiatrist told me he put me on a pedestal. Rages were never directed at me. Any one else including the kids were fair game.
Seventeen years ago my DH was supposed to pick me up in a place about 150 miles from home. He was home while I was on a job for work. I told him I needed him to pick me up at 1pm. He never arrived until 4pm. I had written down my itinerary and when to be picked up. It was also in the computer. He put it in his calendar as 4pm. He did not expect me to be upset. When his mother was suffering from terminal lung cancer, in the last stages, in our home, he wanted to go away on a business trip for a week. He could not understand why he should not go. I put my foot down and said do not go. He did not go and she did die, as I expected. Over the years things happened that caused me to wonder. It was about ten years ago, I started checking out books from the library on AD.Did I mention that he retired at age 53 much to my surprise. Without consulting me. Today, I took him for a haircut. I heard him telling the girl that we were gong to Texas, yes we are. He said we were going for a baptism, no, not so. I am so tired.
I've mentioned this in other threads. Sid was a whiz at electronics. He knew gadgets inside and out, could take them apart and put them together. Hook up anything. But when computers came along - in the mid 80's - he never got the hang of them. I could not understand why. He could never remember what steps to follow for programs or even how to open his e-mail when he got an e-mail account in the late 90's. it never got better, only worse. In hindsight, I am guessing that was AD working its way through his brain.
After my wife was diagnosed with major heart disease at the age of 47, we realized that so many 'signs' were there starting in her late 30s ... but we just didn't recognize them. We attributed her occasional shortness of breath as due to fatigue; we attributed her icy fingers and toes in the winter as probably nothing more than what is called, Raynauds Syndrome. Occasional pains in the jaw and elbow pains ... also due to other causes. We NEVER ONCE considered heart disease... she was too young! Well, recently we were discussing how Clare had so much difficulty with certain tasks ... plus occasional processing difficulties, memory lapses, confabulation, mixing up events, etc. as far back as 8-10 years ago. But why would we consider Alzhiemer's when she was only in her early 50s? By the time she was 60, I started to become convinced she actually WAS in the earliest stages of AD and I brought her to see a neurologist. It took 3 more years before diagnosis since her early symptoms were first diagnosed as due to stress, then anxiety, and then depression. I think we will learn more and more about people who should have been diagnosed in the early stages of AD many years before actual diagnosis is made.
Sometimes I wonder if the depression people have...not the once in awhile blues...but the real deep depression is not a symptom too? Have to say my DH has not and is not now depressed but we read so much about depression and see the ads on tv for depression..just a thought.
This is very interesting to me. My DH, dx'd for about 3 years now, went through a profound depression (that he never acknowledged) when his parents died - one in '95,the other in '98. One who died in '98 became critically ill within six months of the death of the first and my husband never fully recovered. In the early 2000's I learned quite by accident that DH had not filed income taxes in several years. It was devastating to learn and it took a long time to dig out of the financial mess he'd created. I eventually took all that responsibility away from him but a lot of damage was done. I was angry for a long time and it wasn't until we got the dx that I looked back and realized what must have been going on. I'm still trying to understand how the depression played into this - was it depression that made the dementia manifest or was it dementia all along?
Very intriquing. I get into these discussions with others all the time. I DO believe that my husband was becoming ill when (before) I met him, 28 years ago. Soooo many little things, unusual behaviors, some downright scarey...that I mistook for depression, vile personality, odd tendancies, "ticks", irresponsibility, distraction...even his "brilliance" (eccentricity?). Amazingly, he had a successful medical practice through it all, at least until 1996. Scarey.
I have been married for 14 years and I think he has had this for the majority if not all of our marriage. If I would have known that he had dementia before we got married I probably wouldn't have married him because I am not going to purposely put myself in a life of caregiving and not have a kind of marriage that I wanted. I know that there is no way that he could have known at that point unless he suspected and got checked out but...I can't see why anyone would purposely put themselves in our position. I am now in that position and have to make the best of it but how is there even a best of it to make. I don't know, I guess I am just having a bad day.
A lot of days that start out as good ones end up bad! Little things -things no one else would understand - can accumulate throughout the day to make me lose it. I then feel very guilty for having come unglued. Just something we deal with, but I know now there are others out there going through the same thing. Hope your day gets better and maybe tomorrow will be even better still!