Palliative care empowers individuals living with dementia to live a meaningful life in accordance with their values, while also supporting their caregivers. A team of physicians, nurses, social workers, and chaplains provide a holistic approach to assessing and managing physical, psychological, social, and spiritual stressors associated with dementia. Importantly, Palliative Care is provided together with life-prolonging and curative treatments and is available at any age, stage, or prognosis of illness. You can have both palliative care and dementia care; you do not need to choose. Typically ..read more

Ask any new caregiver and they’ll likely tell you that nothing is more overwhelming than learning a loved one has dementia and now needs their help in ways they’d never expected and certainly hadn’t anticipated.Dementia has this uncanny knack of choosing the unsuspecting and ill-prepared. And until you’ve walked in the shoes of a dementia caregiver, you’ll never fully grasp the all-encompassing disruption to life as you knew it–the indecision, the conflict between what you know is real and what your loved one perceives, and even the resentment for this new life you’ve been handed. There’ll be ..read more

About three years after my wife Elaine was diagnosed with Alziemer’s, one of the nurses at the neurologist’s office asked me whether I’d joined any support groups. Who, me? I’m from that generation of men who weren’t supposed to even have feelings, much less show them in public. Does the name Edmund Muskie ring a bell? He was a fine US senator from Maine, a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. But his bid fell apart on a snowy New Hampshire morning when he denounced a publication that, among other slander, was critical of his wife. Some reports asserted that Mu ..read more

A new caregiver is like a driver in a foreign land. The vehicle is a stick shift, the terrain is mountainous with many switchbacks, and there are no maps, timetables, or rest stops. A catastrophic event or diagnosis catapults a caregiver into a territory that is poorly lit and offers up no familiar landmarks. The roads in this new world are all one-way, careening toward a new normal. There is no going back. Fear, confusion, self-doubt, and almost unendurable worry swirl to make the first days of sudden-onset caregiving a blur. At this stage, it’s difficult to retain information or to make impo ..read more

Dementia care is a situation with a lot of hurrying, a lot of waiting, and a lot of overloaded senses. It's easy to carry around all of that anticipation, all of the fear and worry, and not realize that it builds up in our bodies like silt at the mouth of a river. The body cannot tell the difference between stress that is emotional, financial, or life- threatening, so our adrenaline surges, our pulse raises, and our senses can be heightened over any stressor. Over time, a near-constant state of alert can cause hypervigilance, poor sleep, and adrenal fatigue. It's vital to learn to calm our bod ..read more

Resilience is the ability to rebound from a crisis, tragedy, trauma or a serious case of ‘stress mess.’ Resiliency varies from person to person due to a variety of factors but like any skill, resiliency can be learned. Resilience is like a muscle that can be strengthened. Research recommends that you to build your capacity for resilience before having to face difficult situations because highly resilient people won’t fall apart easily, and when we do (cause’ we will!) it won’t be for long. Resilient people: Cultivate awareness of themselves and their environment Practice self-care Keep calm i ..read more

When you suddenly find yourself at the end of your time as a caregiver, you may think you need to jump right back into your life. Instead, make an active decision to STOP. It’s a much healthier choice to take some time for yourself before you return to your normal work or line up new job interviews. You’ve just spent months, most probably even years, putting your loved one’s well being before your own. Before making any immediate decisions about your future, take and give yourself the gift of time to rest and recover physically, mentally and emotionally. You may be wondering just how long it ..read more

Family caregivers are asked to handle a lot. They are responsible for caring for an aging or ailing loved one—meeting their needs in whatever capacity is needed. This description of care is vague, but that is because it is truly an all-encompassing role. For most family caregivers, this means taking on far more responsibility than anticipated and trying to shoulder the burden of care alone. But exhausted caregivers are prone to anxiety, burnout, and depression. How do you know when it’s time to ask for help? And how should you approach that conversation? In this article, we are going to provi ..read more

Communication is not a new topic in dementia care; there are a wealth of resources to help care teams learn to work around whatever communication limitations arise for our loved ones living with cognitive decline. That said, they tend to emphasize communication as reactive: you try something, your loved one responds, and you adjust your approach accordingly. This is in line with the "dyadic" (dyad being a fancy word for duo or pair) emphasis common to dementia care writing: one caregiver addressing the needs of one care recipient. But care dynamics are rarely that simple, even without dementia ..read more

In 2016, friend of Caregiver Wellness Retreat and podcast guest Dayna Steele wrote a personal account of her caregiving journey titled "Surviving Alzheimer's with Friends, Facebook, and a Really Big Glass of Wine". Dayna has graciously given us permission to share excerpts from her book with you in our Blog. January always feels like the perfect time to get organized. Maybe it is the cold temps that keep us inside (in the northern hemisphere anyway) or maybe it is the freshness of the new calendar that inspires me. Whatever it is, now feels like a good time to have "the talk" with my family. N ..read more