I lost myself looking after my dad with dementia: how home carers enabled a daughter to regain her independence

When Katina Sheehan’s father and then mother needed additional support, she initially tried to do it all herself. She tells Rachel Williams why she wishes she’d introduced a ‘liberating’ professional care package sooner

“I lost myself,” Katina Sheehan says of the period she spent struggling to look after her father, Michael, at home as dementia took hold of him, while still trying to work and care for the rest of her family. “I was just so caught up in the devastating trauma of his diagnosis and how he changed as an individual,” she says. “It became all-consuming. And it took me a long time to find my way back to myself.”

Michael, who was Greek Cypriot, had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia in 2017, and Sheehan had brought him home to England from Cyprus, where he had retired with her mother, Anne, many years earlier. For the first 10 months or so, things were OK. But then Michael began to deteriorate swiftly: his personality changed completely, and he became physically and verbally aggressive.

Photographs: Amit Lennon/The Guardian

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