Alastair Stewart: The NHS has given me an important update on an overlooked symptom of dementia
Alastair Stewart for Alzheimers Research UK
GB News
With Christmas well and truly over but spirits still high, it was back to the continuing work the NHS is doing for me. First, I had an appointment in Winchester with the ear, nose and throat doctors, as I’ve had a long-standing problem with a perforated eardrum. They checked me over and confirmed the perforation was still there. It seems it's a chronic problem but a minor infection had been cleared up by some drops the GP had prescribed.
The ENT team knew of my dementia and asked how my hearing was generally. ”Poor,” I replied, and they explained that it was common with dementia, both as a symptom and as a result of either Alzheimer’s and/or vascular dementia.
They booked me in for a full NHS hearing test. I’d had one at a commercial high street setting which resulted in expensive hearing aids. They neither did the amplification job nor physically stayed in place. If your hearing becomes faulty or that of a friend or loved one does - do contact your GP. I found the whole NHS approach top-notch and await my personally fitted hearing aids in a month or so.
The woman who did the test asked me about how the perforation may have happened. I told her about collisions playing rugby and that I wasn’t a diver, but that I did love loud rock music and was a frequent attendee, especially to see the greatest of all time - the Rolling Stones.
We speculated, too, on what the impact of having worn a newscaster’s earpiece for half a century with directors, producers and production assistants shouting in my ear may have been. She felt dementia was the main cause of poor hearing, but the perforation was mysterious. She repeated my GP’s advice: keep the ear dry and never use Q-tips.
As we have known from the outset, dementia is the result of minor strokes, probably caused by high blood pressure, but my medical team also wanted to rule out some fault with my heart. I have a tiny implant which sends data 24/7 to my NHS cardiology team, and I was called in to be told all was good, but they’d do another ultrasound scan in a year or so.
Alastair Stewart gets some important health advice during an NHS consultation
GB NEWSThe cardiologists I see are based at Basingstoke Hospital on Aldermaston Road. With warnings from NATO in the news that the UK needed to improve its defences against nuclear attack. Aldermaston is linked, in my mind, with nuclear weapons. It was home for years to the atomic weapons research laboratories and so the target of the famous ‘ban the bomb’ marches.
It all brought back to mind my debates with my RAF officer father, who served in bomber command in the era of the V force. He used the mutually assured destruction argument to support the UK’s nuclear deterrent. If both sides have it, neither will use it. It was a view subscribed to by labour leader Hugh Gaitskell who begged his disarmers in the party not to send him naked into the negotiating hall. A future leader, Michael Foot, was on the other side and took part in the Aldermaston matches. These were men of great intellect and moral courage - a different Labour party.
I also vividly recall rehearsing all those arguments in my mind when I reported on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union without a bomb being dropped. But with Putin, it now seems NATO feels we need more than simply the means of thermo-nuclear destruction but also better detection and protection - in case Putin, and his mates, go bonkers.
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