4.People think dementia is forgetting - That is the Hollywood version.

People think dementia is forgetting. That is the Hollywood version. Sad music. Blank faces. Names drifting quietly into fog. But PCA (Bensons Symdrome) is different.

Posterior Cortical Atrophy sounds elegant and scientific until it moves into your house and starts rearranging reality. Maurice says it attacks the back part of my brain, the visual processing bit. The eyes still work. That is the joke. The problem is the brain no longer understands what the eyes are seeing. So life becomes fragments. A shadow becomes a hole. A bathroom scale becomes a tunnel. An eyebrow becomes suspicious.

A memory from China in 1983 suddenly feels medically relevant at four in the morning. Experts call it fixation. I call it PCA putting superglue on thoughts. It is four in the morning and PCA is agitating again.

“He’s frightened,” I tell Maurice.

“Who is?”

“Benson.”

“Why?”

“He thinks I’m going to have another baby and my hormones will drown his fucking ants.”

Maurice stares at me across the darkness. Half asleep. Half terrified. Fully confused.

“Karen… it’s four o’clock in the morning.” “I know what fucking time it is.”

The pain is intense. Maurice has switched into calm voice now, which means he is internally panicking but trying to sound like a mindfulness app.

“Drink some water. Breathe. Dr Google says it might be a urinary infection.”

Then suddenly China crashes into my brain. Bang. Straight through the wall.

“That’s it!” I shout. Maurice jumps.

“That’s where it came from. China.” “What came from China?”

“The urinary infection.”

“Karen…”

“The bus stopped in the middle of nowhere and there was this toilet. Well… not really a toilet. More a communist assault on dignity.”

Maurice rubs his face.

“There were eight holes in a concrete box. Eight! You just sat there over everyone else’s shit like some international conference on diarrhoea.”

“Oh God…”

“And the BBC man was there.”

“What BBC man?”

“The Tiananmen Square man in blue overalls. Everyone wanted to hear about the outside world. Some of it sounded terrifying.”

Maurice sighs. Long exhausted sigh. Poor bastard.

“I need a hysterectomy,” I announce.

“At four in the morning?”

“Yes.”

“I think this can wait until daylight.”

“Well now I want a woman doctor because you clearly do not understand female suffering.”

Silence. Then:

“When you passed out in Amsterdam I did not forsake you.” Maurice blinks.

“Forsake?” “Yes. Forsake. I like that word.”

Even PCA pauses at that one. I can feel it slowing down in my brain, puzzled by vocabulary. Little bastard expected panic and suddenly I’m serving biblical language before sunrise.

“People should use forsake more often,” I continue. “Nobody forsakes anybody now. They just unfollow them.”

Maurice laughs despite himself. Tired laugh. Hanging-by-a-thread laugh.

“Karen can get fixated,” he says softly.

And he is right. That is PCA. People think it is memory loss. Sometimes it is the opposite. Sometimes your brain grabs hold of random details and refuses to let them go. A word. A shadow. A pain. An eyebrow. A memory from forty years ago. Once PCA grabs something it will not let go. Maurice says I stare at objects because my brain cannot process the whole room at once. It locks onto one thing like a dog with a slipper. Sometimes I think PCA is less dementia and more an obsessive little bastard living in my head moving furniture around.

People imagine memory loss must be the worst part. It isn’t. The worst part is losing confidence in ordinary things. One day you are running a life. The next you are staring at a measuring tape like it is nuclear engineering. Maurice asked me once to pull it down and I just stood there wondering how a metal snake lived inside a yellow box.

Then there’s the cooker. Christ alive. I used to cook Sunday dinners for armies. Now Maurice sticks coloured laminated signs around the kitchen like we are living inside a low-budget airport.

STOVE HOT.

DOGS FED.

DRINK WATER.

DISHES CLEAN.

I told him the house looks like an escape room designed by social services. But the signs help. Alexa reminding me about pills. Phones beeping. Notes stuck to doors. Tiny systems holding chaos together because PCA loves chaos. And poor Maurice. He says calm things while his eyes scream exhaustion. Sometimes I catch him watching me with sadness he thinks he hides well. Like he is mourning me while I’m still sitting beside him asking whether the BBC man from Tiananmen Square also got urinary infections from Chinese bus toilets. That’s the madness of this illness. You can still laugh. Still swear. Still love. Still fight. You just cannot always trust your own brain. But then Ethan laughs. Or Maurice laughs. Or Luna rests her head on my knee. And I remember something important: I am still here. Broken in places maybe. Confused often. Fixated definitely. But still here. And PCA can agitate all it likes. It still hasn’t realised humour is my weapon.