A Letter to Myself Podcast: Battling dementia in her 50s, Alison Lim fights to remember words
Warning: This story contains references to suicide and suicidal ideation.
SINGAPORE: Dementia is often associated with old age, but for some, the disease strikes much earlier than expected.
For Alison Lim, a fomer corporate executive in the hospitality sector, the diagnosis of primary progressive aphasia – a rare type of dementia – came in her early 50s. Her life, once filled with boardrooms and excel sheets, was suddenly upended by a condition that would rob her of her most basic tool: Language.
The first sign was innocuous. On a family trip in 2012, Alison mistakenly called guacamole – “Guatemale”. Her family laughed it off. “Any time a word (got) jumbled up, we would say ‘Haha, Guatemala,’” Jamie, 27, Alison’s daughter, recalled with a laugh. “It didn’t occur to any of us that it might be a symptom of something.”
But that trip was full of similar moments – forgetting or jumbling up words that Alison brushed off at the time. But soon, these innocent mistakes became impossible to ignore. She began to forget basic descriptions, calling everything a phone.
