Getting a diagnosis

My mother was behaving differently and I wasn’t sure whether it was normal for her age. She was repeating herself more often, telling me things that she had already said earlier, adamant she was telling me for the first time. It was a bit worrying. What I really wanted was some kind of measurement on my mother’s situation, because I’m not a doctor. How would I know what was going on? So I asked my mother’s GP to run some tests, which he did and then said she was fine. But I wasn’t convinced after that. There were still things that concerned me about my mother’s memory. So next time we went, I asked the GP if there were any memory clinics in Auckland. He said no. I found one online, it was in Greenlane, and called him one day and told him about it. He said, no, there are no memory clinics in Auckland, that I must be confusing it with a Greenlane in England. This went on for two years. Things weren’t getting any better. So one day I called Alzheimer’s Auckland and they said, ‘Of course there are memory clinics in Auckland - tell your GP to refer your mother to one.’ We have only just managed to see a memory specialist, but the point is that it was really difficult to actually get a diagnosis for my mother. And we have definitely changed doctors.