From Mom to Me As we age, we are treated differently, make no mistake about it, but until I felt it myself, it never rang true. In my professional life, from time to time I observed how people are marginalized – individuals with mental illness, immigrants, international students, people of color. Now, after years in … Continue reading
Filed under aging parents …
Introducing… My Mom and Me: Two Perspectives
Tomorrow I will upload the first in a series of posts featuring a dialogue between my mother and me on a variety of topics that relate to aging, senior parents, and adult children. Mom and I often talk about aging issues, occasionally heatedly. Sometimes our initial perspectives diverge, but the longer we talk, the more … Continue reading
Great Review – Passages of Caregiving
Read the thoughtful review of Gail Sheehy’s book, Passages of Caregiving, at the Life With Father blog. Chuck’s writing is engaging and evocative as he describes merging caregiving responsibilities with the rest of his life. He doesn’t write often, so I regularly check and recheck my feeds, hoping for a new post.
End-of-Life: Another Form!
In the July 18, 2010 New Old Age Blog Paula Span reports on yet another form we need to fill out if we want the most control at the end of our lives. Her article, A Final Prescription describes the POLST form, though the name may be different from state-to-state. A individual completes this form … Continue reading
Dementia and Alzheimer’s: What’s the Difference?
At the Alzheimer’s Reading Room a June post, What’s the Difference Between Alzheimer’s and Dementia?, by Dr. Robert Stern, explains differences and clears up some common misconceptions about Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. A link at the end of the piece leads to the article’s original source, the ADC Bulletin, a newsletter publication of the Boston … Continue reading
Mother (age 110), Daughter (age 85) – Home Care Miracle
Today, July 18, 2010, the Washington Post featured an amazing story, Home-care Program Gives Mother and Daughter, 110 and 85, Long-awaited Reunion, that describes the home health care provided for an elderly mother and daughter in Washington, DC. After a multi-year separation and despite substantial health problems, the two women have been reunited. A slide … Continue reading
Healthy Aging – Our Health Histories: Deja-vu?
Yesterday I ruminated on healthy aging in my post, Thoughts on Aging: Boomers and Aging Parents, and today one of my Google alerts — one way I discover interesting information to post on this blog — pulled up a fascinating article from the New York Times. On first glance I thought it was recently published. … Continue reading
Thoughts on Healthy Aging: Boomers and Aging Parents
What can be fixed by a doctor and what can’t be fixed? What can be addressed by medication and what can’t be? We boomers only have to look around to see people we know, or maybe even ourselves, indulging in plastic surgery, tooth whitening and remodeling, and much more. Plus we have access, if we … Continue reading
Caregiving Orientation Publication
The Osher Center for integrative Medicine at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) has published an amazing book, Orientation to Caregiving: A Handbook for Family Caregivers of Patients with Serious Illness. This comprehensive, 68-page publication, aimed at families caring for a family member with a serious illness, is just as applicable to adult children who are … Continue reading
New MedlinePlus Website – Terrific!
Visit the new, more user-friendly MedlinePlus website. As an advocate for aging parents, not to mention other family members, I find this new site terrific, easy to use, and well laid out. It’s colorful with carefully selected typefaces, and a user can get anywhere on the site with just a few clicks. After you explore a … Continue reading
iPad for Dad, #10: Vacation, Technology, and Podcasts
We had a wonderful vacation in far-away upstate New York, near Canada. Interestingly, every person — all six of us — brought along our technology tools. Our cottage held six people ranging in age from 57 to 87, six laptops, one iPad, one Kindle, a Blackberry, and five cell phones. In order to charge everything … Continue reading
Aging Parents: NIH Senior Health
The NIH Senior Health site, developed by the National Institute on Aging and the National Library of Medicine, maintains a huge library of videos. According the website, the topics are chosen to “offer up-to-date medical information, tips for healthy living, and inspiring stories of older adults who are coping with diseases or conditions of aging.” … Continue reading
Thoughts on CareGiver Stages of Mind
At the Amazing Aging Mind blog, the author has posted her thoughts comparing the five stages of caregiving to the five stages of grief defined by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying. I’ve put the book link to Wikipedia for background since the since copies — new and used copies — are … Continue reading
Three Medical Reference Sites for Aging Parents
The other day I asked some questions about a particular medication that has been prescribed for one of my parents. When we searched for information on the web, I realized that my parents’ computer needed permanent bookmarks to three reliable health and medical information sites: Medline Plus Mayo Clinic WebMD All of my health and … Continue reading
Founding Director of National Institute of Aging – Robert Butler
Today the Washington Post and the New York Times carried obituaries for Robert N, Butler, M.D., the founding director of the National Institute of Aging and a pioneer on aging research. In fact, Dr. Butler expanded the frontiers of what constituted research on the aging process and aging people. Before Dr. Butler came along gerontology … Continue reading
Caregiving: Feelings and Emotions
Caregiving is complex, confusing, and mostly uncontrollable. When we provide caregiving support, we discover that despite our most valiant organizational efforts we never quite make sense of the situation. Caregivers are never really in control, no matter how well we believe we are doing the caregiving, and we must be comfortable with the situation. During … Continue reading
NICHE: Nurses Improving Care for Healthsystem Elders
A June 29, 2010 article, Preparing More Care for the Elderly, appeared in the New York Times. Written by Milt Freudenheim, who generally writes about the business aspects of health care, the piece describes how the country and our health care system can go about preparing for the huge number of people who are aging. … Continue reading
Hospital Acquired Infections: Kojo Nnamdi Show
The Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU in Washington, DC, broadcast a program on hospital acquired infections on Monday, June 28, 2010. Once you go to the program link — it has not yet been posted as a podcast — the part of the program on hospital acquired infections begins at 18:22. Kojo’s guests included:
iPad for Dad, #9 – Guest Posting from Dad!
If you like this post, read some of the other descriptions of our Father/Daughter iPad adventure. iPad for Dad, #1, iPad for Dad, #2, iPad for Dad, #3, iPad for Dad, #4, iPad for Dad, #5, iPad for Dad, #6, iPad for Dad, #7, iPad for Dad, #8, iPad for Dad, #9, iPad for Dad, #10, iPad for Dad, #11, iPad for Dad, #12, iPad … Continue reading
Aging Research at 11% Tells Only Part of NIH Story
Despite Aging Baby Boomers, N.I.H. Devotes Only 11 Percent to Elderly Studies, appears in the June 28, 2010 New York Times. I tend to agree with Dr. Francis Collins, NIH head, who points out that the 11 percent does not take into consideration research conducted on the conditions such as diabetes and heart disease — health problems … Continue reading
As Our Parents Age So Do We 