A mum who thought she had a brain tumour after she went from laidback to aggressive was told she has early-onset dementia aged 50 and won't live to see her sixties.
Jana Nelson, 53, first noticed symptoms in 2017, after friends and family pointed out her personality had changed.
She was repeating the same questions and sentences and thinking she'd just become forgetful.
She also felt like she couldn't keep her balance when walking, was having trouble making decisions, and suffered from severe mood swings.
Her counsellor recommended she go for neurological tests - believing she could be suffering from MS, or a brain tumour.
Jana Nelson, 53, first noticed symptoms in 2017, after friends and family pointed out her personality had changed.
She was repeating the same questions and sentences and thinking she'd just become forgetful.
She also felt like she couldn't keep her balance when walking, was having trouble making decisions, and suffered from severe mood swings.
Her counsellor recommended she go for neurological tests - believing she could be suffering from MS, or a brain tumour.
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FunTranscript
00:00 I started feeling like the ground when I was walking was unsteady, like I was on a boat.
00:06 And then my family started telling me that I was repeating questions,
00:16 not remembering the answer or that I asked the question to begin with.
00:26 And that just getting confused and not understanding
00:32 things that people were telling me as well as I used to.
00:37 It was my actually my counselor that I'd been seeing for a few years and
00:47 she started noticing things and
00:54 and that the prospect of dementia wasn't really, it didn't cross my mind. Maybe it was in the back
01:03 of her mind, but she didn't tell me at the time. Just that something besides my hydrocephalus was
01:11 happening. And so she at first wanted me to get the MRIs and the blood tests. And then when those
01:19 all came back stable or normal, she suggested I go see this neuropsychologist.
01:29 I thought I had an awareness of what I was capable of doing. And each time that I would do something
01:38 and not be able to do it, it just became one more thing that I realized I wasn't able to do.
01:44 So it was really, it took me completely off guard and
01:49 just made me feel like I didn't really know how affected I was.
01:56 I got the diagnosis in July, July 1st, I think of 2020.
02:11 And it's the diagnosis is major neurocognitive disorder due to
02:17 fetal alcohol syndrome, hydrocephalus, and repeated concussions.
02:23 And I'm in stage five now. At the time of diagnosis, I was in stage four.
02:39 And then I went back for retesting, reassessment, just because the first initial one was a baseline.
02:48 And then in 2022, I went back to see if I progressed or if it stayed
02:54 the same and it's continued to progress. So now I'm in stage five.
03:08 And the prognosis is, they don't really know how long before I hit the next stage.
03:16 But she did say that I probably won't live to see my 60s.
03:25 There's just not enough brain mass and my brain is atrophying
03:32 at an accelerated rate. So it's not a very good prognosis.
03:38 What I found was there was a lot of people like me that, and younger than me,
03:44 that are experiencing the same type of situations. They all have
03:50 different types of dementia. There's people with FTD, Lewy body dementia,
04:00 vascular dementia, Alzheimer's. I mean, it's just, we all, even though we all have different types
04:06 of dementia, we do have a lot of things in common. And it just really gives us each a
04:14 sense that we're not in this alone.