BARBARA Windsor’s heartbroken husband Scott Mitchell says she will have to move to a care home.
Scott Mitchell, 57, revealed his 82-year-old wife’s Alzheimer’s has worsened.
Scott Mitchell was given the bombshell news that the EastEnders and Carry On legend may be forced to leave their marital home after a deterioration in the disease.
The 57-year-old said the stark warning from her specialist had led to some “dark moments” — six years after Barbara, 82, was given her initial tragic diagnosis.
He revealed: “It’s the thing I’ve always feared.
“He’s 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.”
But he then pictured her in a care home, and went on: “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?’”
Scott made the agonising admission in a candid and moving television interview with their friend — and Barbara’s EastEnders son — Ross Kemp.
Barbara did not take part in the show — which airs tomorrow night on ITV — because of her condition.
Scott told the programme of her cruel memory loss — and also revealed he feared giving her the deadly coronavirus.
He told how he developed some sort of “virus” shortly after lockdown in March.
Scott recalled: “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.”
In Ross Kemp: Living with Dementia, the presenter returns to their home to speak to Scott about the change in his wife’s condition.
Scott, who is Barbara’s primary carer, told how her condition had worryingly “progressed”.
Her speech is now getting worse — and she has become increasingly susceptible to falls in the middle of the night.
He said: “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.
“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.”
Scott also shed light on their heartbreaking domestic routine.
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?’”
Scott warned: “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.”
Ross is a long-term friend of the couple, who have been married for 20 years.
He and Babs starred together in EastEnders for several years, with Ross playing hardman Grant Mitchell, son of Queen Vic landlady Peggy, immortalised by Barbara.
But Ross revealed in HOAR last week that Barbara often asks who he is because she no longer recognises him.
Seeing how Barbara has suffered, and the effect it has had on Scott, inspired him to take a look into the issue of dementia — Britain’s biggest killer.
He had not seen his former on-screen mum since February due to the lockdown.
Scott told him how he had noticed a “change in her personality” and that “her joy had started to go” before his wife’s life-changing diagnosis in April 2014.
He also recalls the day their world was turned upside down when Barbara was told she had Alzheimer’s, a degenerative disease that slowly damages the brain, causing dementia and memory loss.
Scott said: “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 realised 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?’”
Speaking to Ross in the first part of the documentary last week, he admitted he “went numb” when they got the diagnosis, and Barbara whispered to him: “I’m so sorry.”
INCREASINGLY DIFFICULT
Barbara was later made a Dame in March 2016.
But Scott took the brave decision to reveal her illness in an exclusive interview with HOAR in May 2018, as it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep it a secret.
When the news first came out, the Alzheimer’s Society revealed visits to its website had doubled — with a 59 per cent increase in one-off, online donations.
Scott told how he later had to call an ambulance for Barbara after she collapsed at home.
Paramedics rushed her to hospital where medics carried out tests. Her heartbeat was found to be dangerously low and she had to be fitted with a pacemaker.
In last week’s episode Scott described her Alzheimer’s as like a computer screen where all the graphics are being wiped from the top down, with the short-term memory going first.
He has put up a board at home with pictures of the couple from over the years in an attempt to help her remember.
Barbara first met Scott, a former actor and recruitment consultant, in 1992. They married in secret at The Dorchester hotel in London with just three witnesses in 2000. She described it as “the happiest day of my life”.
Last September, Barbara made a rare public appearance when she and Scott delivered a letter to Boris Johnson at No 10, demanding better dementia care and more funding.
Scott said: “We talk about a social care problem in this country. Dementia is the basis of a social care problem.”
There are currently around 850,000 people with dementia in the UK.
The cost is around £34.7billion a year, with two-thirds being paid, directly or indirectly, by people with dementia and their families.
The Alzheimer’s Society has estimated that the typical cost of an individual’s dementia care is £100,000.
Scott said: “No one has got that kind of money.”
For help and advice ring the Dementia UK hotline on 0800 888 6678 or visit dementiauk.org.
- Ross Kemp: Living with Dementia, tomorrow night, 7.30pm, ITV
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