Surfer Felicity Palmateer’s plea in honour of mum Pauline
Big wave surfer Felicity Palmateer has turned her four-million-strong social media following into a force for change after losing her mother to early-onset dementia.
Big wave surfer Felicity Palmateer knows she has a big social media following.
The 32-year-old boasts more than four million likes on TikTok, almost 200,000 followers on Instagram, and is co-host of the popular In Deep podcast.
“Social media can be shit for a number of reasons but it can also be great,” Palmateer told news.com.au.
The former Australian Survivor: Brains v Brawn contestant, who made national headlines after learning of her beloved mother Pauline Burggraf’s death from Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) while filming in 2021, said social media has given her a platform to raise awareness about the condition and other forms of dementia.
Pauline was just 46 when she was diagnosed with FTD – a progressive neurodegenerative condition that affects personality, behaviour, and language – dying just six years later at 52.
Palmateer – who is throwing her support behind news.com.au and The Australian’s Think Again campaign – is now using her social media platform to not only keep her mother’s legacy alive by sharing her story, but encouraging others to think about their own brain health.
“It’s just so ingrained in our generation that it’s an older person’s disease and we know that’s not the case,” Palmateer said.
“If you think about where most people are these days that are my age – they are online and they are at socials.
“The more vocal you can be about it the more you can openly talk about it and that does have a ripple effect.
“The good thing about our generation is that everyone is obsessed with health and wellness. Well this is health and wellness. Looking after your brain is just as important as looking after your body”.
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It was through sharing her story online that Palmateer realised she wasn’t alone.
“There is a lot more people than I have realised out there who were at a similar age to what I was – or younger – with parents or loved ones going through early onset dementia,” she said.
By her own admission, it was a busy time in her mother’s life – she was going through a marriage separation, had just completed a teaching degree, and had three children to raise including sons Luke and Alex.
They put behavioural changes including becoming more introverted down to what was going on in her life.
“We were like maybe it’s because of this separation and that’s hard plus all the kids have left home,” Palmateer said.
“It was weird because she just went back to university, got a teaching degree and then didn’t want to go to work.
“So all of her things were behavioural but it was coincided with this separation so it was really hard to know ‘shit is it the separation or something else’.”
It was only after a family reunion – when a relative who happened to be a speech pathologist and had not seen Pauline in almost a decade – noticed changes to her speech that they thought it might actually be something more.
“After that she rang up my grandma, my mum’s mum and was like ‘hey there’s something wrong with Pauline. I think you need to get it looked at’. And so that’s what started it,” Palmateer said.
Given her young age, it took a long time for her to get a diagnosis, with genetic testing finally confirming she carried the defective gene.
“That was sort of the ‘aha moment’ that made my grandmother go back through the family tree on that side and she put all the pieces together.
“Because there was this history through every generation of young deaths but it was either MND (motor neurone disease), or FTD and she put all the pieces of the puzzle together”.
Palmateer credits her grandmother Els Burggraf’s strength and tenacity for not only caring for her ailing husband who later died from MND, but for also caring and advocating for her daughter.
“I just think back to that moment when it happened to my mum, just doing that time I just feel that everything fell to my grandma and my grandma is so strong,” she said.
“When she got diagnosed there wasn’t that much care for it. It was like ‘OK she’s got FTD’ and that was the end of the story.
“I was so lucky my mum’s mum was so good in doing all that research herself and getting into the nitty gritty and finding all this extra information out. We really got her to thank for that because there really wasn’t that much more help.”
It is one of the main reasons Palmateer signed up to be a Dementia Australia ambassador and is supporting calls for dementia care co-ordinators.
“The silver lining of my mum passing away was me being connected to Dementia Australia because now I’ve realised that all this help is available,” she said.
And she is using her voice and social media platform every chance she gets to urge people to start talking openly about dementia.
“For someone affected or touched by dementia, I think it’s really important if they’ve shared that with their friends and their circle around them that you talk about it,” Palmateer said.
“I think it can be very easy for those people to not know what to say in that situation because they’re heavy conversations, or they don’t have to be, but people think that.
“But then they don’t say anything or withdraw from that person and the thing you need most in that situation is support.
“Saying nothing is worse. You should just open up that conversation and check in on that person because I just reflect on that time and it was really isolating especially being so young,” she said.
“So I think the most important thing that you can have is support”.
