Fiona Phillips shares early Alzheimer's symptoms that she dismissed as menopause
Fiona Phillips admits she had no idea she was suffering from Alzheimer's before her diagnosis three years ago. The former Good Morning Britain star, 64, who shares two children with ex-This Morning boss, Martin Frizell, initially put her symptoms, including brain fog, anxiety and a lack of interest in her marriage down to menopause. However, three years ago she was tragically told that she had the neurodegenerative disease, which both her parents suffered with.
Opening up about her early symptoms, Fiona said she had frequent anxiety attacks, "which became almost hourly". She also suffered from brain fog, a lack of confidence when driving and confusion, over the "simplest thing like opening a bank account".
She writes in an extract of her book, Adapted from Remember When: My Life With Alzheimer's, which is published in the Mail:"For me it was the sense of brain fog and a sense of anxiety that I could rarely shake off.
"The simplest thing, like going to the bank to ask about my account, would send me into a total panic, and there were mood swings too, which meant even I was finding my behaviour unpredictable."
Meanwhile, Fiona's marriage was coming under increasing strain. Blaming Alzheimer's for "at least part of it", she said: "I'm sure the disease was at least partly responsible, but at the time neither of us could see it. I just became more and more disconnected from Martin and the boys.
"'You've totally zoned out of our family and our marriage,' he [Martin] would say to me."
Putting her symptoms down to menopause after a leading expert appeared on This Morning, Fiona was taken in for tests.
Martin said: "Dr Newson was lovely. She had a long chat with Fiona and took blood tests. She also put her on a course of hormone replacement therapy. If it was the menopause, then within a couple of months the brain fog and anxiety symptoms should start to ease.
But when Fiona's condition failed to improve after a few months of the HRT treatment, the doctor read through Fiona's notes again and then, says Martin, "said the words I'd been hoping for so long never to hear" - that it may be something more than the menopause.
After a series of tests, including simple subtraction and being asked to draw intersecting rectangles, Fiona had an MRI, which was inconclusive. But, after she had a lumbar puncture she was told she had early-onset Alzheimer's.
Revealing that she and Martin went to the pub for a much-needed drink after the devastating news, Fiona writes stoically: "That afternoon in the pub it had seemed extraordinary that we could continue to live life 'as normally as possible', but that's exactly what we did from that moment on."
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