Barbara Windsor will have to be moved to care home as her Alzheimer’s has worsened, says husband Scott Mitchell

Dame Barbara Windsor's husband Scott Mitchell has shared that his 82-year-old wife will have to be moved to a care home as her Alzheimer’s disease has worsened. Speaking in a candid and moving television interview with the couple’s friend Ross Kemp, the 57-year-old said he was given a stark warning from her specialist that had led to some “dark moments”. Barbara was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2014. Mitchell said his wife’s shifting to a care home is something that he “always feared”. 

“He’s [the specialist] basically telling me I need to prepare myself that at some point it may not be sustainable to give her the kind of care she needs at the house. I’ve had some fairly dark moments since he said that because there’s a part of me that knows that most likely is the truth and that’s what needs to happen,” he continued. “There’s another part of me which can’t imagine letting her go. I can’t imagine leaving that lady when she talks to me the way she does and putting her somewhere and her thinking, ‘Why has he done this to me?’”

Later in the show, Mitchell went on to reveal his wife’s memory loss and shared his fear of giving her the deadly coronavirus. He said in the program that shortly after the lockdown in March, he got some sort of "virus". “I didn’t have the cough but I had every other symptom. I was not well. My biggest fear at that point was that I was going to give it Barbara,” he recalled.

During the television show ‘Ross Kemp: Living with Dementia’, Mitchell said his wife’s condition had worryingly “progressed”. “I have seen a real progression. The thing that has started to happen with her is her speech. She can’t find the words and you just see that frustration building up within her. And what I hate is that eventually she gives up and she looks at me and she just goes (shakes his head). She can’t get it,” Barbara’s husband, who is her primary carer as well, said, adding: “The other thing is she has started to have falls more regularly. What will happen is she will get up, say, two or three times in the night because she needs to go to the bathroom. But her legs will give way and I’ll find her on the floor.”

Mitchell also described their daily domestic routine as he said, “Now that we’re where we are, which is six years after diagnosis, it’s a very common thing for me to sit with Barbara at night, firstly her never having a clue that we are actually in our own home. She looks around suddenly and says, ‘Why are there pictures of me in this house?’

Mitchell added: “Let’s not kid ourselves, and I’d be doing everyone a disservice if I didn’t talk about the realities of where this can end up, which can be people being totally bedridden, forgetting how to speak, forgetting how to swallow. It will take away everything. This will strip you of everything that you know as functioning normally.

“From the day of diagnosis your life changes, not just the person who is living with it. Your life changes, the family’s life will change. I tried to do everything by myself at first. I tried to run the house, do the shopping, do my own work. When I first started having the carers I realized what it had taken off of me . . . the emotional stress, the tiredness. My first thought was, ‘OK, we’re fortunate, what about people who don’t have that?’”