My story and my new life started very innocently over the Easter weekend in 2005. I remember like it was yesterday, sitting at the kitchen table with my parents. My mother was 78, my father 79 years old. I thought I would finally take the bull by the horns and ask them if they knew what they would do when they got too old or ill to live in the house. My father answered right away: "We stay here till we die." Easy to say when you're alone, but when you have a spouse, how can you know both of you will be able to do that?

My mother had been diagnosed with Parkinson's in about 1995. Huge shock to a family that had always been in good health. The tremor in her left hand remained stable, however, and we soon saw she wasn't getting worse (we thought of it as a physical illness then).

July 1, 2005: my mother started hallucinating. Scary! She kept brushing cobwebs away, set the table for six (this really freaked my dad out), saw people in trees, in our neighbour's pool... I called her neurologist to make an appointment. I won't go into details, but this man should not have been practicing neurology. But what did I know then?

July 17, 2005: My mother had lost weight and was still hallucinating, though not as intensely. I had my parents over for lunch that day, before heading out to the airport to fly to Switzerland to visit my younger sister, who lives there.

July 20, 2005: My brother phoned us to say my mother was in hospital, dehydrated, unconscious most of the time. Our father had found her on the living room floor early in the morning the day before. Distraught, he'd called my brother in Ottawa, who drove up to take charge of the situation. She would stay for six weeks, undergoing a battery of tests to help the doctors figure out what was wrong with her.

(Fast forward to 2009: The doctor who treated my mother had already detected signs of Alzheimer's in my father in 2005. He was officially diagnosed in 2006.)

That was the beginning of the end of my life as I knew it. Little did I know that my journey into Parkinson's and Alzheimer's would teach me so much and be so rewarding.