Heart wrenching conversations between a father affected by Alzheimer’s disease and his daughter, talking about the need to take care of elderly people in our society affected by dementia is the plot of author Minakshi Chaudhary Kanwar’s latest book.
In , “A World Within: A remarkable story of Coping with a Parent’s Dementia” Kanwar, whose father has been suffering from dementia for the past eight to nine years now, has penned the book from a first person perspective having experienced the disease at close quarters in such a close relation. She says she means for this story to be read also as an awareness campaign.
“Usually when you write, you write for information, entertainment, and post provocation too, but this latest book is more than this. It is a kind of an awareness campaign.
“This book is more on taking care of parents who are suffering from dementia, and also how to handle elderly people,” says Minakshi, who has been an active journalist in the past.
Dementia, says the author is commonly mistaken as memory loss but in reality is a disorder of the brain, a disease. One loses the ability to reason, to think, to communicate. There comes a stage when you even forget to swallow and even to breathe.
“It is a very harrowing experience. It is a pattern this disease follows. You lose your memory, you become disoriented, your reasoning diminishes, and your thinking process slows down. Everyone goes through this pattern. Slowly it reaches a language problem; the patient would not remember common words.
“After a while, they even forget the close relatives. There is a pattern and that is why this book is special. Through this book, one will get to know how it is to experience dementia or the Alzheimer’s disease,” says the author.