This is an excellent article that gives some insight into what dementia is like.  Visit us at www.andelcare.com for information and assistance with home care for an aging loved one in the Seattle, Bellevue WA areas.

What’s it Like Have Dementia?

By Frena Gray-Davidson

If you have a parent or a spouse with dementia, you probably wonder what people inside the disease feel. One thing that’s always okay is to ask them.

Dementia can be a very isolating condition. It can really affect how well people can communicate. Of course, as we all know, it certainly affects memory. It can be hard for people to even find the words or hold the thoughts they have. It makes it very hard to follow through a whole explanation about anything.

You won’t hurt a person with dementia by asking what you want to know. In fact, it might help them feel less lonely. Because of their condition, they might not be able to find you the answer you want. But that’s okay. Trying is good enough for both of you feel closer.

Five Questions People Ask About Dementia:

1. Does it hurt to have dementia?

Dementia is not a physically painful condition. It is emotionally painful, for family and for the person who has it. If you know someone with dementia who is also having head pains or other pain, it is essential to get them to a doctor for help and relief of their pain.

2. What do people with dementia think about?

Having dementia makes clear and flowing thought difficult. It is hard to be logical and rational with dementia because brain deterioration blocks the channels for clear thought.

That said, they think about their past, their family, their wants, their needs and maybe sometimes nothing much at all.

3. Do they lose all memory?

Not necessarily. Studies show that, while short-term memory becomes catastrophically bad, longterm memory may be anything from surprisingly good to very mediocre.

So a person who doesn’t remember anything about this morning may be able to tell in detail all about being young and living with their parents.

4. What does it feel like to have dementia?

From my 20 years with people with dementia, I’d say it feels frightening, lonely, confusing and full of bewilderment.

But also, just like us, they feel loving, angry, sad, anxious, grateful and add your own adjectives.

5. How can I help?

By using the qualities of patience, love, tolerance, understanding — and honesty. The best thing you can do is to be a fairly nice version of yourself and also truthful. You can say things like:

- “I hate this illness you have!”

- “I wish you were well again!”

- “It’s just not fair!”

- “I’m scared!”

You won’t hurt a person with dementia by being honest about how you feel. In fact, it might help them a lot. It might bring you back closer together. Because what you feel about their illness might well be just what they feel. Maybe they can’t find the words and you being honest might help them talk about it.

Remember, people with dementia are ill, but not necessarily fragile and breakable. So you can talk to them as if they could understand an adult conversation. You’ll soon find out if they understand or not. If they don’t understand today, they may understand tomorrow.

And it’s really okay to experiment and find what works. If you can make them laugh, you will notice that they function at a much higher thinking level for anything from about half an hour to maybe two hours.

It’s the miracle of endorphins. Use and enjoy!

Frena Gray-Davidson is a longterm Alzheimer’s caregiver and her latest book is “Alzheimer’s 911: Hope, Help and Healing for Caregivers”, available from http://www.amazon.com. Frena presents dementia seminars nationally and internationally. Go to her website at http://www.alzguide.com/ and sign up for her free monthly online newsletter for caregivers.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Frena_Gray-Davidson

Words for Seniors Facing Loss

By PAULA SPAN

Original Content found HERE.  

My father is a relentlessly upbeat guy. “Up and around!” he reports when I call. “Keeping busy!” He tells me about his volunteer work, his card game winnings, the (seated) yoga class he enrolled in at the library. His favorite refrain is, “I can’t complain.” (And yes, yes, yes, my sister and I do know how lucky we are.)

He does tell me about the funerals, though. At 87, watching his peers struggle with the physical and psychological trials of old age, he goes to a lot of them. He keeps losing people he’s known for years — onetime co-workers, senior members of his synagogue, neighbors in his tightly knit apartment building.

His friend Molly, too frail in her 90s to remain alone in her house, recently moved to the Midwest to live with her son; they’ll probably never see each other again. The weekly card game now involves an entirely different group of guys than when he started years ago, and it sometimes stalls for several weeks as the players have health crises or move or die. Replacement players are growing harder to find.

“These things keep happening when you’re over 80,” he told me.

He goes to funerals because, he said: “It’s just the right thing to do. It shows that you feel bad, that you’ve lost a friend.”

What do you say to this litany? You want to offer something reassuring, something to lighten the sense of loss, but you can’t evade the reality: He’s outliving his friends and family members. His cohort is thinning.

Luckily, I can turn for counsel to Barbara Moscowitz, senior social worker at the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Senior Health program. (One benefit of writing this blog is that you can call up experts and pose questions, supposedly on behalf of readers, that you really want answered yourself.) Ms. Moscowitz hears such litanies from clients and their adult children all the time.

And her personal guideline is to remove age from the equation and ask yourself how you would respond if the one suffering losses was a peer, not an older person.

“We impose our expectations,” she said.

When old people lose their friends, she added: “We think, ‘You should be able to manage this. This is what happens. You should be used to it.’ Because if we ask what it’s like, we may hear what it’s like. We fear opening the floodgates of sadness.”

But we wouldn’t tell a 55-year-old friend who had attended three funerals in two months to just buck up, would we?

“When there’s been loss, to expect happiness is just denying the truth,” Ms. Moscowitz continued. “It opens up a divide between older people who then deal with the sorrow privately, knowing nobody wants to hear about it, and younger people who want them to be cheerful all the time.”

Of course, some older people don’t want to talk about the illnesses or deaths of their friends or neighbors, either — but in her experience, Ms. Moscowitz said, most do.

“Those people are part of their history, their legacy,” she said. “If we send a message that we don’t want to hear about it, it says: That person is not worth remembering.”

Grief — feeling sad, weepy, temporarily at sea — is different from clinical depression, it’s important to recognize. Grief is a normal response to loss; depression is an illness that’s usually treatable, both in young people and old ones. Symptoms that persist — like appetite loss, sleep problems, loss of interest in normal activities, thoughts of suicide and, in older people, confusion or agitation — are red flags that signal the need for a medical evaluation.

But my father is not depressed. He’s coping with one of the more difficult aspects of a long life. So I listen to the funeral reports and try not to respond by pointing out all the reasons he has to feel fortunate.

I try to remember to say things like: “Ah, that’s so sad. How long had you known this person? What was he like? Do you need help arranging a ride to the funeral home? I’m sorry, Dad. It must be hard. I bet you’ll miss him.”

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

Visit us at www.andelcare.com for assistance with an aging loved one in the Seattle, Bellevue WA area.

One resolution I have made, and try always to keep is this: To rise above the little things. ~John Burroughs

Life Is Getting Measurably Better for Many People Here and Abroad
• By MELINDA BECK

News about health often focuses on the negative: scary new flu viruses, incurable diseases, dashed hopes for miracle drugs. Maybe that’s because we have such high expectations that doctors and scientists can fix anything.  But amid all that bad news—not to mention the acrimony over health-care reform—it’s easy to overlook how much progress has been made in recent years. Here are 20 health-care advances to give thanks for:

• Nearly 62% of U.S. adults said they were in excellent or very good health, along with 82% of their children, according to families sampled by the federal government for the National Health Interview Survey, which was conducted in 2007 and released this year.
• Fewer Americans died in traffic fatalities in 2008 than in any year since 1961, and fewer were injured than in any year since 1988, when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began collecting injury data. One possible reason: Seat-belt use hit a record high of 84% nationally.
• Life expectancy in the U.S. reached an all-time high of 77.9 years in 2007, the latest year for which statistics are available, continuing a long upward trend. (That’s 75.3 years for men and 80.4 years for women.)
• Death rates dropped significantly for eight of the 15 leading causes of death in the U.S., including cancer, heart disease, stroke, hypertension, accidents, diabetes, homicides and pneumonia, from 2006 to 2007. (Of the top 15, only deaths from chronic lower respiratory disease increased significantly.) The overall age-adjusted death rate dropped to a new low of 760.3 deaths per 100,000 people—half of what it was 60 years ago.
• The death rate from coronary heart disease dropped 34% from 1995 to 2005, though it is still the biggest single killer in the U.S. Deaths from cardiovascular disease dropped 26% over the same period. Deaths from stroke dropped 29% since 1999. Average total cholesterol in adults aged 20 to 74 dropped to 197 milligrams per deciliter in 2008 from 222 in 1962.
• The death rate from cancer, the second-biggest killer, dropped 16% from 1990 to 2006. That reflects declines in deaths due to lung, prostate, stomach and colorectal cancers in men, and breast, colorectal, uterine and stomach cancers in women.
• Nearly 40% of U.S. adults have never had a permanent tooth extracted because of dental cavities or periodontal disease in 2004, the most recent data available, compared with 30% in 1994.
• Three out of 10 U.S. schoolchildren aged 5 to 17 in 2007 did not miss a single day of school because of illness or injury during the preceding 12 months.
• Hip fractures—which can rob elderly patients of their mobility forever—are down nearly 30% in the U.S. and Canada since 1985, for reasons not completely understood.
• Thanks in part to vaccines, the rate of acute viral hepatitis A dropped 90% between 1995 and 2006, and acute viral hepatitis B dropped 88% from 1982 to 2006, both to record lows. Acute viral hepatitis C is down to 0.03 from 2.4 cases per 100,000 since 1992, though rates have recently plateaued.
• Thanks largely to antiretroviral drugs, U.S. deaths from AIDS dropped 10% from 2006 to 2007, the biggest decline since 1998, and they remain well below the 1995 peak. New cases of AIDS, though static in recent years, also remain well below the 1990s level. Antiretroviral drugs have also helped cut dramatically the number of babies born with HIV in the U.S.; in 2006, there were 28 diagnoses of AIDS among children, down from 195 in 1999.
World-wide, more than four million people in low- and middle-income countries were receiving antiretroviral therapy for HIV/AIDS at the end of 2008, a 36% increase in one year and a 10-fold increase over five years.
• The proportion of undernourished children world-wide under five years of age declined to 20% in 2005 from 27% in 1990.
• Chalk this one up as an advance for mental health: The U.S. divorce rate dropped by one-third from 1981 to 2008, and is at its lowest level since 1970. This may be due to more couples postponing marriage or to economic constraints, as well as to couples’ determination to stay together.
• From 2006 to 2008, the median percentage of U.S. secondary schools that don’t sell soda rose to 64% from 38%, and those that don’t sell candy or high-fat snacks rose to 64% from 46%, in the 35 states that collect data.
• Around the world, 27% fewer children died before their fifth birthday in 2007 than in 1990, due to greater use of insecticide-treated mosquito nets, better rehydration for diarrhea, and better access to clean water, sanitation and vaccines.
• The amount of trans fats in packaged food has declined by about 50% since 2006, when the Food and Drug Administration began requiring food labels to list it. At least 13 jurisdictions, including California and New York City, have restricted trans fats in restaurant food.
• Twenty-seven countries reported a reduction of up to 50% in the number of malaria cases between 1990 and 2006.
• As of this month, 71% of the U.S. population lives under either a state or local ban on smoking in workplaces and/or restaurants and/or bars, and 19 states have banned smoking in all three kinds of places. Research has found that air quality improves and heart-attack rates drop in areas that have enacted smoking bans.
• Experts have found that some of the best things you can do for your own health are simple and free: Getting adequate sleep can help you lose weight, fight infections, recall memories and think more clearly. Spending just 30 minutes a day in the sunlight to soak up vitamin D across a broad swath of the country can reduce your risk for a variety of cancers, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, osteoporosis and many other diseases. Volunteering to help others can lower your risk for depression and heart disease, raise your self-esteem and happiness and extend your life, according to numerous studies.
• The longer you live, the happier you are likely to be. Many older adults find that happiness and emotional well-being improve with time; they learn to avoid or limit stressful situations and are less likely to let negative comments or criticism bother them than young adults, according to research presented at the American Psychological Association conference in Toronto this year. 
 

Of course, there have been setbacks as well as many steps forward, and the gains haven’t been universally shared. The full effects of the H1N1 virus are not yet known. Infant mortality remains high. Teen pregnancy is up. Obesity is rising. Organ transplants are down. The decline in cigarette smoking has stalled. But other breakthroughs loom on the horizon, including personalized cancer medicines, promising drugs for lupus and Lou Gehrig’s disease, gene therapy and cancer vaccines, and tests that may one day discern small deadly cancers from larger, slower ones. This should give us plenty more to be thankful for next year.

 I started off the New Year with a bang – having a colonoscopy. Exciting, right? It may not be the most exotic thing you can do at the first of the year but it was good to get it over with and know that everything is fine. I don’t know about you but January just came and went. I have been so busy with new wonderful clients that I didn’t get our newsletter out until February. So if you were looking for a January newsletter you can now have peace of mind knowing it never existed.

Instead of focusing on bad news, this month is heart month and I wanted to give you all some good news about health advances in the attached article.
I have more good news. Andelcare was just awarded the 2010 Better Workplace Award on February 3rd, 2010 in Olympia WA. This is the second year we have won and it would not be possible without my fantastic staff that makes sure we have the highest quality and best trained employees caring for the ones you love.
Happy Valentine’s Day and I wish you all blissful prosperity and love this coming year,
Marla

In photo (L to R): David Brukardt (AWB Board Chair), Marla Beck, and Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna

2010 Better Workplace Awards recognize innovation, commitment to employees

SEATTLE, February, 2010— Andelcare Home Care services receives a “Better Workplace Award” from the Association of Washington Business.  The Association of Washington Business recognized 18 businesses and non‐profit organizations for their outstanding commitment to their employees. The awards, presented during AWB’s annual Legislative Day in Olympia, were given to employers of all sizes and industries throughout the state for their superior commitment to workplace safety, job training and advancement, and innovative benefit and compensation programs.

“The winners of this year’s awards represent the best of Washington’s business community,” said AWB President Don Brunell. “These are perfect of examples of the kind of innovation and forward‐thinking that’s needed to attract the best workers to our state. Building a strong, talented workforce is one of the most important things we can do to help Washington emerge strong from the recent downturn.”

Attorney General Rob McKenna said “the training and advancement programs recognized today demonstrate that investments in staff pay great dividends. And the innovative benefit and compensation programs honored today reflect the tremendous flexibility and commitment  Washington’s businesses provide to their teams.”

The Better Workplace Awards program is open to all AWB members. An independent panel of judges reviews all the nominees and evaluates the programs based on a variety of criteria, including their impact on employee morale, increases in worker productivity, improvements in recruitment and retention and reductions in the cost of worker training. AWB also gives Continuous Commitment awards to companies that have previously won the Better Workplace Award and have continued to be innovators in their efforts to improve the employee work environment.

David Brukardt (AWB Board Chair), Marla Beck, and Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna.

February is American Heart Month.  Here is valuable information about the warning signs of an impending heart attack.  Visit us at www.andelcare.com if you need help for an aging loved one in the area.

Heart Attack Warning Signs

Some heart attacks are sudden and intense — the “movie heart attack,” where no one doubts what’s happening. But most heart attacks start slowly, with mild pain or discomfort. Often people affected aren’t sure what’s wrong and wait too long before getting help. Here are signs that can mean a heart attack is happening:

Chest discomfort. Most heart attacks involve discomfort in the center of the chest that lasts more than a few minutes, or that goes away and comes back. It can feel like uncomfortable pressure, squeezing, fullness or pain.

Discomfort in other areas of the upper body. Symptoms can include pain or discomfort in one or both arms, the back, neck, jaw or stomach.

Shortness of breath with or without chest discomfort.

Other signs may include breaking out in a cold sweat, nausea or lightheadedness

As with men, women’s most common heart attack symptom is chest pain or discomfort. But women are somewhat more likely than men to experience some of the other common symptoms, particularly shortness of breath, nausea/vomiting, and back or jaw pain.

Learn the signs, but remember this: Even if you’re not sure it’s a heart attack, have it checked out (tell a doctor about your symptoms). Minutes matter! Fast action can save lives — maybe your own. Don’t wait more than five minutes to call 9-1-1 or your emergency response number.

Calling 9-1-1 is almost always the fastest way to get lifesaving treatment. Emergency medical services (EMS) staff can begin treatment when they arrive — up to an hour sooner than if someone gets to the hospital by car. EMS staff are also trained to revive someone whose heart has stopped. Patients with chest pain who arrive by ambulance usually receive faster treatment at the hospital, too. It is best to call EMS for rapid transport to the emergency room.

Original content found HERE.