Ted Slack's dreams of a blissful retirement were shattered by a terminal disease diagnosis but he overcomes challenges everyday with the help of wife Sally

Here the couple reveal how their love is helping them come to terms with Ted’s terminal illness:

As interviews go it was a life-changer.

Not only did Sally Reynolds secure herself a job with the social services team at Winchester’s Royal Hampshire County Hospital – she also clapped eyes on her future husband for the first time.

While she may not have initially realised the full implication of the meeting, Ted Reynolds – the manager interviewing her – did.

He admits to irretrievably losing his heart to Sally there and then.

In a kinder, fairer world, that would have been it.

Instead, two decades later, the couple have found their lives melting into a gruelling daily existence as a rare, debilitating, and ultimately terminal neurological condition wrecks their retirement.

Ted, once a chatterer who relished tramping through country woods, is now wheelchairbound and finds talking increasingly tough and exhausting.

The final years of his career saw him take on a part-time lecturing role in Social Services at the University of Portsmouth.

Some of his students spotted small changes in the way he walked and spoke but, such was his immense popularity, no one could bear to publicly voice their worries.

Ted, 70, describes his initial symptoms as akin to drunkenness; swaying as he walked, falling up flights of stairs, clumsiness and anger.

Ted Slack

But the little-known Progressive Supranuclear Palsy is renowned amongst the six in 100,000 people it affects for being hard to diagnose, as many patients display symptoms similar to other neurological diseases, such as Parkinson’s or Dementia.

In 2009, baffled doctors put Ted’s condition down to stress. It was only last year that a neurologist pin-pointed it as PSP.

Now they’re wavering again – perhaps he has Multiple System Atrophy after all?

It’s easy to assume that the chronic adversity the couple face would slowly suffocate their souls – but the chemistry between them fizzes as their sparkling eyes lock.

Sally finishes Ted’s sentences when his speech falters, and there seems to be a practicality about their approach to a serious degenerative illness, perhaps borne of shared decades working in social care.

But when Ted says “I feel my life isn’t worth living”

and clearly means it, Sally hangs back from filling the aching silence that follows.

It’s her husband who finally goes onto explain: “I feel I have lost control of life.

“I get very frustrated, I used to walk everywhere.”

Now Ted has trouble reading and his “fingers aren’t where he thinks they are”.

It’s a measure of the sheer cruelty of PSP therefore that the clarity of his thoughts remain unaffected.

“He used to talk non-stop, he was a great extrovert,” explains Sally.

“We always used to say that as soon as a thought entered his head he said it.

“Now as the day goes on he says less and less, and the words don’t come out at all at the end.

“There are lots of people in his life, but they are people who are helping him rather than people he has chosen.”

One of the couple’s greatest loves used to be travelling, spinning around the globe to visit the likes of Germany, India and New Zealand.

Now they’re landlocked in Winchester thanks not only to Ted’s increasing physical frailty, but the difficulty of securing travel insurance for him, a task Sally drily describes as “a game in itself”.

They receive the medical and social care they need – but say that’s only because they know how to access it through their shared professional background.

How do other people manage, they wonder.

Astonishingly in the circumstances, Sally, 64, still works, spending two days a week at a Chichester hospice.

Their other days are punctuated with activities organised by Winchester’s Live At Home Scheme, such as exercise classes and subsidised pub lunches.

Once a month they attend a PSP help group based in Wherwell, north of Stockbridge, run by a volunteer whose own mother suffered from the disease, dying of its complications aged just 66.

Louisa Roberts-West waited seven years to allow her own grief to subside before establishing the Hampshire and Wiltshire PSP Association Group, which now draws dozens of sufferers and carers from as far away as Bristol and Horsham.

“Although Mum was mentally ‘intact’ the rest of her body would no longer co-operate and it was slowly ‘closing down’ on her,” says Louisa.

“It gradually robbed her of the ability to walk, talk or even swallow.

“The nature of PSP means that it often takes many frustrating years before a diagnosis is made.

“This can lead to feelings of isolation and desperation, so just being amongst others in the same situation is a comfort in itself.”

The PSP group clearly provides solace for Sally and Ted, although it’s probably their tight, symbiotic emotional bond which carries them through years which can only get more arduous, and eventually lead to one outcome.

In the meantime, they do not know how quickly his health will continue to decline.

And, unlike other neurological diseases, there’s no medication Ted can take to combat PSP, only tone down some of the more minor physical glitches.

A short-lived trial on Parkinson’s drugs merely gave him hallucinations.

While their situation is heart-shredding, it is mutual respect, gentleness and dignity which reign in the couple’s home in the face of whatever PSP throws at them.

“The latest challenge we found was that we can’t access a bank,” says Sally. “I can’t push a wheelchair around hilly Winchester and there’s nowhere you can park outside a bank in the city. A lot of places say they’re accessible, but they’re not.”

When asked what the future holds, Ted replies: “I guess I get worse. “I laugh at everything. It’s better than crying.”

For information about PSP and the Hampshire and Wiltshire PSP Association Group log onto: pspassociation.org.uk.

ALI KEFFORD