CHEW THE FAT with Lee Hagger · The Lee Hagger

S11:EP15 pt1 - Living With DEMENTIA, A Journey From The Start To The Bitter Sweet End

February 4, 2026·1 hr·4 clips

Karen was diagnosed with mixed dementia — and her only concern leaving the hospital was whether she would fail her driving test.

1. CHEW THE FAT host Lee Hagger and his partner Cara record an episode about living with and losing someone to dementia, recorded at home while Lee recovers from a hair transplant following the death of Cara's mother Karen just after Christmas. 2. Cara is an experienced care worker with prior professional experience supporting people with dementia, though she had not witnessed the early-stage signs before the illness developed in her own mother. 3. The episode's purpose, as Cara explains, is to show the full arc of a dementia journey because people do not talk about it enough. 4. Karen's husband Mick died suddenly approximately ten years before the episode, and Cara believes the unprocessed grief — Karen never sought counselling and was by nature a chronic worrier — may have been a contributing factor in the onset of dementia. 5. Cara called her mother two to three times a day because she felt sad about Karen's loneliness after Mick's death, and it was this frequency that first let her notice the repetition of stories told earlier the same day. 6. Watching the American drama This Is Us on Channel 4 — which Cara describes as the best show she has ever seen, with six or more seasons of roughly hour-long episodes — she recognised her mother's behaviour in the fictional mother character's early dementia signs and decided to make a doctor's appointment. 7. Because Karen was too stubborn to attend any appointment voluntarily, Cara used the cover story of a leg ulcer medication review for every visit — from the GP to the specialist at Malden Hospital to the MRI brain scan at Broomfield Hospital. 8. A GP rang Karen's home phone before the first appointment and asked Cara a set of screening questions about self-neglect: whether Karen was still cleaning, eating properly, washing, and changing clothes — questions that made Cara realise she had not checked whether Karen was actually washing. 9. At the specialist assessment at Malden Hospital, Karen could not repeat a simple sentence the doctor had just spoken — "I went to the shops and bought some bananas" — and could not correctly complete a clock-face drawing task or dot-joining exercises. 10. The formal diagnosis of mixed dementia was delivered at Malden Hospital; Karen appeared to acknowledge it but the information did not register, and she immediately forgot the dementia diagnosis itself. 11. The one detail Karen retained and fixated on for weeks after the diagnosis appointment was that she might have to retake her driving test — calling it ridiculous and blaming Cara for making her attend. 12. Between initial GP referral and formal diagnosis, the process took approximately eight to nine months, with long waits between appointments. 13. The episode describes a carer named Katie who looked after Karen at home and whom Cara describes as "literally an angel," saying Karen would not have been able to remain at home without her. 14. The day Karen stopped recognising Cara — after two and a half years of daily contact and calls — is described as a sudden shift: one day she knew exactly who Cara was, and the next she did not. 15. Toward the end Karen could not take even a teaspoon of food, and Cara describes saying to her brother Mark that it felt like their mother was not going to bounce back this time. 16. Cara and her brother Mark slept on the floor either side of Karen's bed in her final night; they were woken by the family dog running up to Cara's face, and when they both sat up and looked, Karen had died. 17. The episode is a two-person conversation recorded intimately at home, with Lee asking questions to draw out Cara's account rather than delivering a structured narrative. 18. The tone is emotionally direct and often punctuated by laughter at specific absurd details — Karen flirting with doctors, FaceTiming with the camera pointing at the ceiling — which reflects the hosts' established rapport rather than a lack of gravity. 19. People who are currently supporting a family member with dementia or processing a recent bereavement will find this episode directly relevant. 20. Listeners who find personal grief accounts distressing or who want medical or clinical detail rather than lived experience may find this episode difficult.

As heard by us

Ordinary family details make the dementia story hit harder.

CHEW THE FAT turns a family memory into something raw and immediate: the lost phone, the changing clothes, the missed meals, and the moment when a mother who once seemed steady starts to feel farther away.

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Why you'd press play

You want the early signs before anyone has the words for what is changing at home.

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