Over the past week, there have been two TV programmes on that I couldn’t bring myself to watch.

One was Panorama Undercover: Elderly Care, which included footage of an 80-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s disease being hit in a care home.

The other was Louis Theroux: Extreme Love, Dementia, looking at “the struggle of living in a world of encroaching shadows, and of keeping relationships alive in circumstances that can be among the strangest and most challenging imaginable”.

I didn’t watch either programme simply because it was all too close to home.

For the past 15 years, I have watched my mum deteriorate with a vicious strain of dementia that has left her blind, unable to walk and trapped in a dark world. It’s a brutal condition that has turned her from a sunny, busy, vibrant woman into an empty shell.

She loved being a teacher and being a mum. Her life was a whirlwind of amateur dramatics, WI, running the Brownies, directing children’s pantomimes and singing in choirs.

Nothing fazed her, whether it was rustling up some offbeat curry she’d just discovered for an impromptu lunch party, reciting self-penned monologues to audiences in draughty village halls, or creating costumes for a fancy dress float on her old sewing-machine.

Now she spends each day sitting in a chair until her carers arrive to put her to bed for a few hours in the afternoon.

She mumbles, she cries, and sometimes she screams as if in pain. Occasionally she’ll say “thank you” when I put a drink to her lips, or “that’s lovely” when I rub moisturiser into her hands, and I catch my breath.

She started with dementia in her mid-50s. At times caring for her has been unbearable, particularly when we had to dress and wash her, making her confused and aggressive, and when she regularly fell over, slumping to the floor like a dead weight.

Thanks to an excellent home care package, she has been able to stay at home with my dad, but occasionally she goes into a care home for a while, giving him much-needed respite.

Visiting my mum in a care home is perhaps what breaks my heart the most. It’s not just that we’re putting her into the hands of strangers, trusting them to keep her hydrated, feed her by hand, keep her clean and soothe her when she wakes up shrieking. It’s the overwhelming feeling that she doesn’t belong there.

Anyone who has a loved one in care will know that, once the painful decision has been made, you’re relying on the kindness of strangers. And nothing will ever be the same again.