It was at a hospital appointment with her dad when a doctor told Laura she had a 50/50 chance of developing the same type of early onset Alzheimer’s known as the “London variant”.
“All I could think was, that’s a toss of a coin,” she says. “I was still so involved with what was going on with him [her dad]. I just pushed it really, really deep down.”
Laura’s dad died in 2009, just a year after her mum had died.
“All of a sudden I got such an overwhelming urge to leave,” she says. So she booked a solo around-the-world trip, eventually settling in Melbourne, Australia.
It was there that thoughts of inheriting her dad’s condition “started creeping in” and she went to see a specialist in 2013.
He told her a test could determine with 99.999% certainty if she would inherit early onset dementia. If she had the gene, her expected age of decline would be 46 to 48, he said.
“I just thought, I’m not there yet. I don’t want to do that.”
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