Sunday 11 March 2001 is a date Vicky Donoghue and Michelle Spratt cannot forget. In Come On In, they recall how John collapsed while washing the car he loved. A neighbour called up to the open window where Vicky was changing the bedding. The paramedics checked his blood pressure and, after hearing about his vomiting, thought he had food poisoning. John refused to go to hospital. By the following morning, one side of his face was drooping, and his speech had become unclear. Looking back, the family also remembered smaller changes they had struggled to explain before that day.
Odd habits were hard to understand
John was in his late fifties, and dementia was not something the family considered. He repeated himself, lost things and snapped at a student for making noise during a line dancing class. Then he gave up teaching altogether. Vicky would leave the room to make tea and return to find that he could not tell her what had happened on television. She began finishing his sentences when he could not find the words.
Come On In shows why the family did not recognise these changes as signs of illness at first. Each incident seemed unlike John, but they questioned their own understanding of what had happened. They had little reason to suspect that the man with such a sharp memory was becoming seriously unwell.
Work and driving brought further concerns
John took a delivery job but came home one day with the van still full of customer orders. He had been unable to complete his deliveries in a town whose streets he once knew well. On another occasion, he drove into a central reservation bollard. The damage to his much-loved car barely seemed to concern him.
Mail-order boxes also began filling the hallway with cameras, tools, watches, shoes and vitamin pills. A stranger persuaded him to hand over debit cards and PIN numbers to pay for fake designer clothes. Cold callers ignored the sign on the front door, leaving Vicky to cancel contracts John had signed.
These incidents affected far more than his memory. His judgement was changing too, leaving him vulnerable in situations he would once have handled with confidence.
The scan came before the dementia diagnosis
After John’s collapse, the GP arranged an emergency MRI scan and visited the family home to explain the results. The book describes extensive damage and bleeding in his brain. John was just fifty-nine.
His memory and thinking continued to decline, and further neurological tests followed. The official diagnosis of vascular dementia came in 2006, when he was sixty-four. The family also recalls seeing Alzheimer’s, frontotemporal dementia and Pick’s disease listed in the summary of his condition.
The years between the stroke and the dementia diagnosis were difficult to understand. The family initially thought dementia mainly affected memory. They gradually learned how much it could also change mood, judgement and behaviour.
A drawing test revealed another difficulty
A clinical psychologist asked John to draw a clock. He drew the numbers before the outline. When asked to draw a house, he started with the windows. She explained that these drawings revealed problems with his spatial awareness.
In 2007, his driving licence was revoked. The authors describe how devastated he was. For someone who had enjoyed driving and taking spontaneous trips with his family, losing his licence meant losing an important part of his independence.
Such moments help readers understand how illness entered ordinary life. Familiar tasks became difficult, and each new restriction brought another loss.
The family wished they had known more
Near the end of the book, Vicky and Michelle share ten practical points drawn from their experience. The first concerns seeking urgent help when someone collapses with a suspected stroke.
Their account returns to the day John became ill and the uncertainty that followed. His apparent recovery when the ambulance arrived did not explain what the family noticed the next morning.
This part of the memoir reflects how little they understood at the time. They had to learn while caring for someone they loved, often without knowing what would happen next. Their wish to share that experience runs throughout the book.
Understanding came a little at a time
The authors admit that, in some ways, not knowing what lay ahead spared them further fear in the early years. Yet that same lack of understanding left them unsure where to turn. They wrote Come On In because they wanted other families to have the book they had needed themselves.
John’s story begins with a full and happy life, which gives these early changes their meaning. Readers see a husband and father whose familiar habits slowly became harder to recognise. Through Vicky and Michelle’s memories, Come On In offers a close view of that uncertain time and the family’s efforts to make sense of it.
