I thought my husband, 36, was falling in love with me – turns out to be symptoms of DEMENTIA

A woman whose husband was diagnosed with dementia when he was 30 has revealed how it was almost dismissed as a midlife crisis.

Kristin married Lee Holloway in Maui in 2015 and they had a baby in 2016, but within months her “brilliant, amazing husband” became a completely different person.

Suddenly, the notoriously early riser was struggling to get out of bed in time for work, which quickly turned into missing entire days of work at the cybersecurity company Cloudflare that he helped build.

He lashed out at colleagues, withdrew and ultimately was unable to leave the bank. Instead, he chose to watch Home Alone for the tenth time that week.

Kristin worried it was a problem in her marriage; maybe this life wasn’t what Lee wanted after all.

But in January 2017, a neuropsychologist told the couple that 35-year-old Lee was experiencing one of two things: a severe psychotic attack or the early stages of frontotemporal dementia, a rare and aggressive form of the disease that affects people in their 30s and 40s .

Lee showed behavioral changes that concerned Kristin and his colleagues, becoming angry and recalcitrant one moment and apathetic the next.

It is the same form of dementia that struck actor Bruce Willis, 69, in 2022 and television personality Wendy Williams, 59, last year.

Lee, now 43, is in the advanced throes of behavioral variant FTD, which leaves him unable to speak or care for himself without constant assistance.

Lee, his parents and his 24/7 care on an estate in California, separate from where Kristin and their son live their normal lives.

Living apart from Lee was a difficult decision for Kristin, but she made that decision to give their son as normal a childhood as possible. She said she had been alone in their marriage for years anyway.

When co-Cloudflare founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn saw Lee for the first time in months in 2018, they didn’t recognize their old friend. To them, he looked like a zombie shuffling wordlessly from room to room.

Living with Lee and a baby became dangerous for Kristin. Some days Lee would rush out the door leaving the baby gate and front door open, often without any regard for the traffic. He eventually went to live with his parents.

Thanks to the windfall from Cloudflare’s IPO, Lee has constant care on a sprawling estate where Kristen and their son can see him whenever they want, but they have separate lives.

Kristin said, “The combination of my son’s development and Lee’s progress has been a wild journey: when my son was potty trained, Lee became incontinent.

“When my son started talking, Lee stopped.”

Kristin Holloway joined Cloudflare in 2011 as a communications specialist fell for Lee after both of their previous relationships crumbled in 2013 (hers an engagement and his a marriage).

Kristin worried that Lee’s behavioral changes were signs that he was unhappy in his new life with her and a baby on the way.

Kristin said that Lee’s energy level was always so low that he had trouble getting out of bed, even when we were on vacation together

When the two got engaged in 2014, Lee decided to get to the bottom of his migraine attacks by undergoing surgery to repair a heart murmur, believed to be the driving force behind his headaches that kept him confined to bed for hours.

His heart emerged stronger than ever, but the operation marked a turning point in the young couple’s lives together.

Kristin was about six months pregnant when Lee had to take time off work. From writing code in the office to sleeping for hours or sitting at home with his hat pulled over his face.

He struggled, but attributed it to post-surgery recovery, often uttering the same refrain: “I’ll do better.”

Kristin said, “When he stopped working, his behavior decreased dramatically. He didn’t change out of his pajamas and spent a lot of time on the couch. He watched the same movies and TV shows repeatedly.

‘By September he was watching Home Alone about ten times a week. He showed no motivation or desire to be productive. That was not normal behavior for anyone, let alone my brilliant, wonderful husband.”

Unlike Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, which most noticeably affect a person’s memory, FTD first manifests as personality and behavioral changes, so that a driven but good-natured child prodigy becomes recalcitrant and apathetic, starting fights with friends and loses interest in personal hygiene.

Other hallmark signs of FTD would later become apparent in Lee: compulsive behaviors such as watching a movie ten times in a row or obsessively counting the trees in his backyard, or combative interactions with other people, such as fighting with Kristin’s obstetrician, who said she had done that. to undergo an emergency caesarean section.

The baby came and Kristin was left mostly alone. Lee was out.

Now 43, Lee is non-verbal and lives in 24-hour care. The average life expectancy after a diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia is approximately seven and a half years

Lee’s diagnosis is the same as that of Die Hard actor Bruce Willis, 69

During couples therapy, she openly cried about their situation and said that Lee didn’t seem to care about the baby or be aware of what was happening around him.

According to a report in WiredAt one point, Lee got up in the middle of a session to say he forgot to return the therapist’s bathroom key and walked out of the room.

Kristin says: ‘I started making appointments with all kinds of doctors, including our GP, a cardiologist, a neurologist, a psychiatrist and a neuropsychologist.

“Mind you, our baby was only a few months old. In between all these appointments, I was pumping milk in the car for my husband, who was having trouble getting out of bed at the time. I was in full survival mode.”

When a doctor brought up the word “dementia” in January 2017, Kristin was perplexed.

She said: ‘This is the disease that older people get when they start to forget things. That’s not possible… Meanwhile, Lee was completely unaware of what this meant. He said he was still recovering from heart surgery and would get better. I thought maybe he was in denial.”

Lee’s MRI scans confirmed that parts of his brain closely involved in personality, behavior and language had shrunk, a hallmark sign of dementia.

Kristin said, “I called my boss, explained what the scans revealed and gave my two weeks notice… My husband wasn’t going to get better. Every moment would be the last time I would be with a healthy version of him.”

Behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia, which receives far less attention than other forms of dementia such as Alzheimer’s disease, became mainstream last year when it was announced that actor Bruce Willis had been diagnosed with it.

Like Mr. Willis, the disease has affected Lee’s ability to speak. Atrophy in the fronto-temporal lobes of the brain often overlaps with areas surrounding language comprehension and speech.

She has since joined the board of the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration, and she established the Holloway Family Fund in Lee’s honor and helped launch an annual summit for FTD researchers and clinicians to compile the year’s findings and discuss in the hope of one day finding a cure. .