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
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Aging Parent Hospitalizations – Family Caregiving Tips
Our family has experienced two types of aging parent hospitalizations, and we handled each in a slightly different way. For surgeries a or medical procedures that required a hospitals stay, we monitored the situation one way, but if our parent was hospitalized overnight for dehydration or observation, we focused on different things. Our aim, in … Continue reading
End-of-Life and Pacemakers that Keep on Going
If you are not a regular reader of the New York Times, use this link to go to What Broke My Father’s Heart, by Katie Butler, published in the June 14, 2010, NY Times Magazine. Butler writes about the enormous difficulties her family encountered after a pacemaker was inserted into her father’s chest despite that he had … Continue reading
Aging Parents: Questions to Ask About Home Health Care
Are you asking questions, trying to figure out whether home health care might work for an aging parent? Are you seeking a way to evaluate a parent’s need for support because he or she wishes to continue living at home? Is your home safe enough for aging parents to visit? The Visiting Nurses Service of New … Continue reading
Aging Parents, Hospitals, and Noise
The Boston Globe (Boston.com) recently published an article on hospital noise, Fixing the Noisy Hospital — a timely topic for my family. Written by Drake Bennett, the May 30, 2010, news story highlights the problem of hospital noise and its negative impact on healing. Last year I was directly involved it two hospitalizations, one for my … Continue reading
Another Gail Sheehy Event
This video at Iowa Public Television features Gail Sheehy lecturing on May 19, 2010, at the Des Moines Public Library about her book Passages in Caregiving. Sheehy’s lecture, part of the library’s Authors Visiting Des Moines series, describes the “predictable caregiving crisis” highlighting problems that caregivers experience and offering strategies that caregivers can adopt to … Continue reading
Inside Aging Parent Care — A Blog Worth Following
If you haven’t already explored, Inside Aging Parent Care (the writers have commented a couple of times on this blog), head on over to read thoughtful, intriguing and skillfully written postings, many of which zero in on how we as caregivers can and should harness our inner strength. Caring for the caregiver — what a … Continue reading
Caregiving: How One Couple Avoided Burnout
… by trying to work together During three years of caring for a senior parent, my husband and I took many steps to ensure that neither of us would shoulder too many burdens, lose too much sleep, or just reach a point where one of us ran out of steam. We knew that any one … Continue reading
More on the National Library of Medicine: for Boomers and Aging Parents
In my last post I wrote about the tutorial at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) designed to help people learn how to evaluate health information on the web. NLM, one of 27 institutes and centers at the National Institutes of Health, provides much more on its website, information that is especially useful to families seeking … Continue reading
Aging Parents, Adult Children, Everyone: Evaluating Web Health Info
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) web site features a medical research user’s guide, Evaluating Internet Health Information: A Tutorial from the National Library of Medicine, with step-by-step techniques to ensure that the information you discover is good and reliable. The narrator speaks slowly and clearly. A link at the end takes the user to a … Continue reading
Aging Parents: Washington Post Caregiving-Financing Series
This past Sunday personal finance columnist, Michelle Singletary, wrote about her introduction to aging parent/adult child caregiving, explaining how her father-in-law, in his 80’s, requires daily assistance and has moved in with his children (her family). Writing in the May 16, 2010 Washington Post, Singletary explores the challenges that exist for her and members of … Continue reading
Caregiving: Gail Sheehy-Diane Rehm Show Podcast
If you are, have been, or will be involved in caregiving for a parent, spouse, or other family member, listen to author Gail Sheehy, discuss her new book, Passages in Caregiving: Turning Chaos into Confidence, on the Diane Rehm Show, a syndicated public radio program produced by NPR Station WAMU in Washington, DC. The program … Continue reading
Dementia: Will I Catch It?
W8J8SJ5DBYR5 Last week, after the publication of Greater Risk of Dementia When Spouse Had Dementia? The Cache County Study (abstract), practically every newspaper health section and blog was featuring this type of headline: If Spouse Has Dementia, Your Risk Rises, Too (MSNBC.com) Dementia Risk Higher if Your Spouse Has Dementia (WebMD) Spouses Who Care for … Continue reading
Dementia: Small Schedule Tweak, Big Result
In March the National Public Radio health blog, Shots, reported an interesting and delightful story, Midnight Munchies Keep Elderly Safer In NY Nursing Home. An employee at the Parker Jewish Institute, a nursing home in New Hyde Park, New York, started, quite accidentally, a midnight snack program for dementia patients in her unit who tended to … Continue reading
Dementia: The Problem of Wandering
The May 4, 2010 New York Times features a health article, More With Dementia Wander from Home, focusing on the problems families experience when a family member with dementia wanders and gets lost. The piece explains how a rising number of confused dementia patients are walking away from home, requiring the development of new policing and … Continue reading
Aging Parents: Dehydration Dangers
Warm weather brings increasing concern about dehydration, and it is especially worrisome for older seniors. I am thinking more about this today after reading an update at the Life With Father blog that describes how difficult it can be to get an elderly parent to drink enough liquids. Dehydration is a huge concern for elderly … Continue reading
Late-Stage Dementia, Hospitals, and Feeding Tubes
A professor at the Brown University Medical School was the lead author on a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Hospital Characteristics Associated With Feeding Tube Placement in Nursing Home Residents With Advanced Dementia (abstract). Joan M. Teno, MD, used Medicare data from 2000 to 2007 to evaluate how … Continue reading
Caring for Aging Parents…Balancing Life… Podcasts
Take a few minutes to read the post Striking a Balance: Eldercare and the Workplace over at Changing Aging, the blog of geriatrician Dr. Bill Thomas (his bio at As Time Goes By). The post discusses how to balance parent caregiving with the rest of life. He was joined in a presentation by Dr. Judah Ronch (both men … Continue reading
End of Life Decisions
My post, Aging Parents: Research on End-of-Life Decisions, discussed the University of Michigan study that evaluated how a person’s end-of-life decisions are taken into consideration by hospitals and medical personnel. Pauline Chen, MD, in her regular New York Times column, also wrote about this research, sharing a personal story about her father-in-law’s death. The article … Continue reading
Aging Parents, Atrial Fibrillation, and Dementia
New research, published last week in the April 2010 edition of the journal Heart Rhythm, reports an association between atrial fibrillation and all types of dementia. The article, Atrial Fibrillation Is Independently Associated with Senile, Vascular, and Alzheimer’s Dementia (abstract and full text available), describes the study, which included 37,025 patients already a part of … Continue reading
As Our Parents Age So Do We 