Caregiver Stories

Rewards and Challenges of Taking Care of Seniors

• TreatmentDiaries.com: Sharing With Anonymity

  TreatmentDiaries is truly a different kind of social networking. One user shared this in their diary, “Being non-judgmental and anonymous is very healing. So many people are here to uplift you and maybe give some advice, but definitely lots of love and caring. In my own life, my family is always trying to FIX things, when all I (we) want sometimes is just someone to listen…..”

  By Mary Otte
• Coping as Caregiver for a Spouse

  Caring for a spouse brings a different set of challenges than caring for a parent. Lynn Greenblatt shares invaluable life lessons from her own personal experiences.

• The Long Hello~The Other Side of Alzheimer’s
  By Cathie Borrie, RN, BSN, MPH, LLB
• Taking On Alzheimer’s Disease: Summit by Summit

  Well-known mountaineer Alan Arnette has laid out a challenge of epic proportions for himself in order to raise awareness and funds for a cause very close to his heart.

• Keep Your Memories Alive

  In 2008, a New Jersey mother was stricken with lung cancer and taken from her family too soon. She left behind not only a husband, but also two children under the age of six.

  By Kerry Glass
• A Wife’s Diagnosis, A Husband’s Despair: The Reality of Alzheimer’s

   Jan’s Story by Barry Petersen, the multiple Emmy-award winning CBS News correspondent, is the heart-wrenching account of his wife Jan’s Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease.

  By Julie Davis
• Eight Key Ways to Fight When You Receive a Cancer Diagnosis

  "You have cancer." They are the three words that you hope you never have to hear—yet, at some point in your life, you may. And whether the diagnosis is for you or someone you love, those words will change your life forever.

  By Joni James Aldrich
• Enter Cooking

  The message is sobering: It takes love, hope and a lot of intestinal fortitude to do the right thing when a parent needs you in the final act of his or her life. The medium is engaging: Family Meals: Coming Together To Care For An Aging Parent, the new book from Michael Tucker, is an honest account of how he and his wife managed—as daughter and son-in-law, as parents of their own grown children and, most difficult of all, as spouses—to navigate the chaos of a parent moving into a quick, somewhat anticipated and yet still hard-to-accept decline.
  
  Accomplished stage actors, Michael and his wife, Jill Eikenberry, became household names when they starred in the groundbreaking ensemble TV show L.A. Law from ’86 to ’94. An eventual move back to New York and the subsequent purchase of a 350 year old house in Umbria has had them most recently dividing their time between the States and Italy, a lifestyle that becomes more and more enviable to the reader of Family Meals as the book details one fabulous Italian meal after another, temporary reprieves from the family crisis soon to reach a boiling point.

  By Julie Davis
• Cheers to Root Beer and Books: My Father’s Final Chapter Impresses Heart and Soul Forever

  Last Labor Day, armed with burgers and sweet corn fresh off the grill, potato squares with sausage, homemade lemon bars and a six-pack of root beer, and balancing plastic lawn chairs and a basket of mums, I arrived at the senior living community my parents called home determined to take the Labor Day party outside. My plan was to coax my dad out of bed with my snazzy farmer’s market fixings and turn their teeny patio into an outdoor paradise. My goal: to transform months of the hard labor of illness into an afternoon of summertime fun.

• Learning From a Crisis
  
• Moving Through the End of Life
  
• Preparing for the Future
  
• Executive Changes Jobs to Care for Parents

  John Venator’s 18 years as president and CEO of the The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), an industry trade group in Oak Terrace, Illinois, demanded a heavy international travel schedule. Venator kept in touch with his parents in Rochelle, Illinois, 86 miles away from Oak Terrace, mostly by phone calls and occasional visits. But just one year before his own retirement, Venator detected some changes in his parents’ capabilities that he felt required a bigger presence in their lives. So he asked the Board of Directors for a different position, one overseeing the organization’s charitable education foundation, which would require less of his time and travel. In exchange, he agreed to extend his contract for an additional year.

• Two Nieces Step Forward to be Family Caregivers

  Lina B., along with her sister, had suffered through the sudden and tragic death of her mother, and her father’s untimely passing only one and a half years later. By coincidence, her mother’s death occurred shortly before September 11, 2001, not far from New York City. After reeling from the aftermath of the tragedies in 2001 and 2002, Lina and her sister took a collective deep breath and tried to return some normalcy to their lives, which included a husband, son and a full-time job for Lina.