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International News Title: Margaret Thatcher's struggle with dementia revealed in daughter's memoir Margaret Thatcher's struggle with dementia has been revealed in a new book by her daughter Carol. Her mother's gradual loss of memory, which began in 2000, is described in moving detail in the memoir. Ms Thatcher, a journalist, also discloses that she had to repeatedly break the "truly awful" news of the death of her father Sir Denis until the information sank in. In the book, "A Swim-On Part in the Goldfish Bowl: A Memoir" Ms Thatcher recalls how she first noticed her mother's failing memory during a lunch in 2000. Describing her mother's "blotting-paper brain" which had always absorbed vast amounts of information, she tells of her shock when her mother became confused between Bosnia and the Falklands during a conversation about the war in the former Yugoslavia. She writes in the memoir, which is being serialised by a Sunday newspaper, "I almost fell off my chair. Watching her struggle with her words and her memory, I couldn't believe it. She was in her 75th year but I had always thought of her as ageless, timeless and 100 per cent cast-iron damage-proof. "The contrast was all the more striking because, until that point, she'd always had a memory like a website." Dementia affects 700,000 Britons, two-thirds of them women. Symptoms include forgetfulness and personality change. Ms Thatcher's account is the first time a member of Baroness Thatcher's family has spoken of her illness. "From the fateful day of our lunch, tell-tale signs that something wasn't quite right began to emerge," she writes. "Whereas previously you would never have had to say anything to her twice, because she'd already filed it away in her formidable memory bank, Mum started asking the same questions over and over again, unaware she was doing so. "It might be something innocuous - such as 'What time is my car coming?' or 'When am I going to the hairdresser?' - but the fact she needed to repeat them opened a new and frightening chapter in our lives. "I had to learn to be patient, a quality I admit is in short supply. I also had to learn she had an illness and that it wasn't personal. "That's the worst thing about dementia: it gets you every time. "Sufferers look and act the same but beneath the familiar exterior something quite different is going on. They're in another world and you cannot enter." One of the most heartbreaking results of the illness, Ms Thatcher writes, was that she kept forgetting that her husband Denis had died from pancreatic cancer in 2003, and her daughter had to keep breaking the tragic news to her. "Losing Dad ... was truly awful for Mum, not least because her dementia meant she kept forgetting he was dead," Ms Thatcher writes. "I had to keep giving her the bad news over and over again. "Every time it finally sank in that she had lost her husband of more than 50 years, she'd look at me sadly and say 'Oh', as I struggled to compose myself. 'Were we all there?' she'd ask softly." However, when a friend asked Lady Thatcher about Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, "she snapped back into Iron Lady mode and was utterly engaging." The former Conservative Prime Minister headed the government between 1979 and 1990. Now aged 83, she has kept a low profile in recent years and her doctor advised her to stop making public speeches after a series of small strokes. She made a rare return to the limelight when she visited Downing Street as a guest of Gordon Brown in September last year and attended this year's Wimbledon tennis tournament. Ms Thatcher said her mother still had a good memory of her time in office at No 10 "as if her dementia had sharpened her powers of long-term recall". Ms Thatcher's twin brother Mark has recently been accused of funding an attempted coup to oust the dictator of Equatorial Guinea, President Teodoro Obiang Nguema. Mr Thatcher pleaded guilty in 2005 to breaking South Africa's anti-mercenary laws but escaped prison with a fine and a four-year suspended sentence.
Poster Comment: Prayers to the Iron lady.
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