Caring Currents

The other night at bedtime my seven-year-old daughter shared with me the fears that were keeping her up at night: demon ghost dogs, and the fire she feared would consume the house, starting with her room.

The demon ghost dog -- well, I won't bore you with the details of how he was dispatched (there's actually a special spray you can keep by your bed in a bottle, but never mind….). To allay her fear of fires, however, I walked her through the house, showing her the smoke alarms in each bedroom and the hallways, and the fire extinguisher we keep in the kitchen just in case.

I explained how the smoke alarms beep when the batteries get low, and how we always keep fresh batteries on hand to replace them. Mom and Dad, I reassured her, have things covered. After all, as her caregivers, that's our job.

Her timing couldn't have been better. October, it turns out, is Fire Safety Month, and as part...  Read more

Last week, my kids' babysitter rushed outside yelling at me to follow. Had a child fallen off a scooter or out of the tree? Not this time. There on the sidewalk was my neighbor, an elderly woman suffering from terminal cancer. She’d collapsed while trying to take in the garbage can.

My babysitter, bless her heart, was lifting the woman up and saying soothing words in Spanish, both women's first language. The neighbor was OK. Frail and a little disoriented, but not hurt. Then her voice became urgent. Could we please not tell her daughter, with whom she lives, that she fell? Could we keep this a secret? She was worried, she said, that her daughter would move her to a nursing home or hospice, and all she really wants is to live her last days at home.

Wow. Talk about a poignant moment. I flashed back to a conversation I'd had more than a year ago with an expert on falling from the Centers from Disease Control (CDC) after the agency had released its annual fall statistics...  Read more

The hottest tool for people with Alzheimer's and dementia is a baby harp seal. A robot baby harp seal, that is. "Paro" is soft and cute as a stuffed animal, but it also coos when its fur is stroked, wiggles on the lap, bats its eyelashes, and makes little noises. Paro reacts to warmth and sound, and remembers previous interactions.  

Six-pound Paro debuted in the U.S. earlier this year. It was designed as a therapeutic robot by Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology back in the 1990s and has been used with elderly people with dementia (and youngsters with autism) in Japan and other countries for several years.

What's so good about it? Lifelike Paro stimulates the senses and encourages communication. It relaxes the person with dementia, lowering the risk of depression and behaviors like agitation, especially during transitions, which can get tense...  Read more

During these rocky economic times, an increasing number of people are sacrificing their health to save money and cut back on spiraling health care costs, reports the Wall Street Journal.

When faced with skyrocketing premiums, deductibles, and prescription drug costs, more people are choosing to skip doctors visits and forego their prescription drugs, according to the article, which found that:

• 22 percent of people surveyed said that they were going to the doctor less often because of money woes, while in a different survey, 11 percent said they were cutting back on filling their prescriptions.
• The number of total prescriptions filled fell 0.5 percent in the first quarter and 1.97 percent in the second, compared with the same periods in 2007 -- the first negative quarters in at least a decade.
• Drugstores like Walgreens are reporting slower sales of prescription drugs.
• Health services company LabCorp...  Read more

Lois De Domenico isn't prone to dramatic pronouncements. So I'm all ears when she tells me matter-of-factly that a second opinion "saved her life."

Here's what happened: The slim, lively, octogenarian philanthropist -- a veritable pin-up gal for the AARP set -- practices yoga every morning, eats a healthy diet, and had never had a major illness. But in September last year the San Francisco Bay Area resident began feeling ill, particularly in the evenings, and found herself dealing with unexplained fevers and drenching night sweats that saturated the bed sheets.

She went to her doctor. He did a work-up, couldn't find anything wrong, and sent her home with the advice to take a couple of Tylenol if the symptoms persisted. Lois didn't get better, found herself reluctantly leaving a fundraising event on a Friday evening, and drove herself home. The following Sunday she called her physician's practice and the on-call doctor offered to send her antibiotics...  Read more

When my children were very young, the parenting books I valued most were those that helped me understand what the world looked like from a child's point of view (books by Penelope Leach, and The Magic Years by Selma Fraiberg come to mind.) Now that I'm the parent of two teenagers and a teen wannabe, I reach in moments of distress for Get Out of My Life, by Anthony Wolf, which helps me comprehend the often-baffling workings of the teenage brain.

So far, I've found two (nonfiction) books that provide an empathetic and illuminating perspective on aging. I've already discussed one of these books here: How to Say it to Seniors by Caring.com expert David Solie.

The other book I return to again and again is Another Country: Navigating the Emotional Terrain of Our Elders, by psychologist Mary Pipher. In her book, Pipher shows how our mobile, fast-paced, and fragmented modern culture has failed to create a productive, meaningful role for older people, and instead shoves them aside and ignores, infantilizes, or isolates them...  Read more

When Paul Newman died on Friday, we lost yet another truly great man to cancer. Newman, age 83, died Friday at home in Westport, Connecticut with his wife of 50 years, actress Joanne Woodward, and his five daughters by his side. Yet until reports of Newman's illness surfaced in June, the public wasn't aware that the revered actor and philanthropist was battling the disease.  

A slew of reports in June speculated that Newman had lung cancer after he appeared looking gaunt at a fundraiser for his Hole in the Wall Gang camps for children with life-threatening illnesses, and the photos were published on Martha Stewart's website. However, his publicity rep refused to confirm the rumors.

Here's the thing: It's wonderful when a celebrity publicly acknowledges having cancer. In the past, having cancer was something people were frightened and secretive about. And even today, many people choose to keep a cancer diagnosis private...  Read more

Do you worry about older relatives who live alone -- what if they fall down the stairs, or have a heart attack, and are unable to call 911?

If you share these worries, you're like me and enough another Americans that General Electric (GE) is anticipating a 5 billion dollar market for the electronic home monitors it just announced an agreement to market and develop.

The monitors GE will be selling -- already available from several smaller manufacturers and in use in a few hi-tech nursing homes -- are more sophisticated than the currently more widely-used Personal Emergency Response Systems (PERS),  which require elders to wear a pendant or bracelet and push a button when they need help.These monitors are attached to the walls, silently track seniors' movements, and can generate a call for help if there is a fall or another medical emergency.

Is GE overly-optimistic in predicting huge demand for these devices in the coming years...  Read more

A recent discussion about adult diapers and humor caught my attention. In her blog, “The New Old Age,” New York Times writer Jane Gross reflects on a series of stories in Slate for what it calls its Geezer Issue or "Slate Goes Gray."

While appreciating some of the information in the series, Gross found a few articles offensive because they poke fun at aging. She was particularly bothered by a first-person review of adult diapers, written by a 27-year-old guy who admittedly had no experience with the products before being asked by Slate to do a test drive and write about it. 

I’ve written about adult diapers a few times in this space. For many seniors and caregivers diapers are simply a necessary part of daily life. This includes writing about  another diaper test drive, or in this case, a test drive threat. This was by the health minister of Ontario, Canada in a flap about the quality of care in state-run nursing homes...  Read more

People with advanced dementia have "a duty to die." Or so says Baroness Mary Warnock. My first reaction, after the shiver of shock finished running down my spine, was that whoever this woman is, surely as a baroness she can afford decent care for loved ones in the late stage of disease! And then I discovered that in addition to being a British government adviser, Lady Warnock is its "leading moral philosopher."

"If you're demented, you're wasting people's lives -- your family's lives -- and you're wasting the resources of the National Health Service," this philosopher says. With cold morality like that on their side, no wonder people in the UK are in full-scale panic over its dementia explosion. (You can't even get NHS reimbursement for drugs like Aricept over there.)

Of course she has it all backwards. The duty in end-stage Alzheimer's lies not with the afflicted but with the people around them -- and not to kill them but to love them, or at least act as humanely as possible...  Read more