elderly care
Care for the Elderly: Ageing with Love
Monday, March 16th, 2009 | home care | No Comments
Recalling that far more assertive and influential time in their lives, the elderly insist on their right to age gracefully, usefully, and so far as they possibly can, their way. Rather than merely riding off into the sunset, older adults choose to brighten the horizons of their minds and lives through continued involvement in family, schools, work place, and community. Most elderly reject the diminution of their abilities and interests, although as they age into the seventh and eighth decades they may be compelled to restrict their direct involvement somewhat. Their capabilities, reduced by time and the tides, are nevertheless firmly based on direct on-the-job experience in managing households, family affairs, and professional and technical careers. With such knowledge and experience the elderly will remain a vital resource.
(From Surviving The Future, by Arnold Toynbee, Oxford University Press, 1971) Man is a social being, and therefore, among all the objects for his love that there are in the universe and beyond it, he ought, I suppose, love his fellow human beings first and foremost. But he should also love all non-human living creatures, animals, and plants as well because they are all akin to man; they too are branches of the great tree of life. This tree has a common root; we do not know where the root comes from, but we do know that we all spring from it. Man should also love inanimate nature, because this, too, is part of the universe which is man’s habitat.
(Our grandchildren) are not responsible for the existing state of the world. The reality is that the middle-aged generation (the parents of the rising generation) brought them into the world and is educating or miseducating them, or just ignoring their educational needs. If the middle-years or older generations are indignant at the rising generation, who is really at fault? Who shirked their responsibilities to their children and grandchildren? And with whom lies the initiative to resolve these inadequacies? In effect, it is up to the older generation to take the initiative to bring about reconciliation between itself and the generations that are to follow them.
Home Care Ireland: Stop Complaining and Start Living!
Friday, March 13th, 2009 | home care | No Comments
How often do we hear others or find ourselves complaining of a fault over and over again! “I know that is a fault of mine, and has been for years. I wish I could get over it.” “I know that is a fault of mine,”–one brain-impression; “it has been for years,”–a dozen or more brain-impressions, according to the number of years; until we have drilled the impression of that fault in, by emphasizing it over and over, to an extent which daily increases the difficulty of dropping it.
So, if we have the habit of unpunctuality, and emphasize it by deploring it, it keeps us always behind time. If we are sharp-tongued, and dwell with remorse on something said in the past, it increases the tendency in the future.
The slavery to nerve habit is a well-known physiological fact; but nerve habit may be strengthened negatively as well as positively. When this is more widely recognized, and the negative practice avoided, much will have been done towards freeing us from our subservience to mistaken brain-impressions.
Let us take an instance: unpunctuality-for example, as that is a common form of repetition. If we really want to rid ourselves of the habit, suppose every time we are late we cease to deplore it; make a vivid mental picture of ourselves as being on time at the next appointment; then, with the how and the when clearly impressed upon our minds, there should be an absolute refusal to imagine ourselves anything but early. Surely that would be quite as effective as a constant repetition of the regret we feel at being late, whether this is repeated aloud to others, or only in our own minds. As we place the two processes side by side, the latter certainly has the advantage, and might be tried, until a better is found.
Of course we must beware of getting an impression of promptness which has no ground in reality. It is quite possible for an individual to be habitually and exasperatingly late, with all the air and innocence of unusual punctuality.
It would strike us as absurd to see a man painting a house the color he did not like, and go on painting it the same color, to show others and himself that which he detested. Is it not equally absurd for any of us, through the constant expression of regret for a fault, to impress the tendency to it more and more upon the brain? It is intensely sad when the consciousness of evil once committed has so impressed a man with a sense of guilt as to make him steadily undervalue himself and his own powers.
Here is a case where one’s own idea of one’s self is seventy-five per cent below par; and a gentle and consistent encouragement in raising that idea is most necessary before par is reached
And par, as I understand it, is simple freedom from any fixed idea of one’s self, either good or bad.
Home Nurse: How to Sleep Peacefully Every Night
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 | home care | No Comments
When we are not necessarily overtired but perhaps only a little tired from the day’s activities, it is not uncommon to be kept awake by a flapping curtain or a swinging door, by unusual noises in the streets, or by people talking. How often we hear it said, “It did seem hard when I went to bed tired last night that I should have been kept awake by a noise like that–and now this morning, I am more tired than when I went to bed.”
The head nurse in a large hospital said once in distress: “I wish the nurses could be taught to step lightly over my head, so that they would not keep me awake at night.” It would have been a surprise to her if she had been told that her head could be taught to yield to the steps of the nurses, so that their walking would not keep her awake.
It is resistance that keeps us awake in all such cases. The curtain flaps, and we resist it; the door swings to over and over again, and we resist it, and keep ourselves awake by wondering why it does not stop; we hear noises in the street that we am unused to, especially if we are accustomed to sleeping in the stillness of the country, and we toss and turn and wish we were in a quiet place. All the trouble comes from our own resistance to the noise, and resistance is nothing but unwillingness to submit to our conditions.
If we are willing that the curtain should go on flapping, the door go on slamming, or the noise in the street continue steadily on, our brains yield to the conditions and so sleep naturally, because the noise goes through us, so to speak, and does not run hard against our unwillingness to hear it.
Elderly Care Talk: Living History
Monday, February 23rd, 2009 | home care | No Comments
For many of us, our lives are keyed to significant events, transitions, locales, or something that has importance to ourselves or to our families. For me, the important events and episodes happened to be on a time-line by location: the places where my family resided over the years. I spent the first twenty-five years of my life in the city where I was born and raised. Afterward, a few years in a distant city, then on to another and still another, each invariably distant and different than before.
After I retired, I took the time to make notes on as many important events that I could recall, and keyed each to a geographic location. I gave each episode a title or sketched a brief outline that would stimulate my memory to the place and help me to talk about it. My list began with city A: my preschool and school years (with several sub-headings because those times had been chaotic); the Great Depression, the first job, etc. City B: why I was there; the job; etc. I continued on to the next and the next.
When I finished my initial list of ‘cities’ or ‘countries’ and numbered them I found that I had more than two hundred events, episodes or time periods. I arranged them so that one followed the other as they had occurred or were otherwise linked. That became my outline.
I took the list along when I visited my grandchildren (my daughter had briefed the family beforehand about Grandpa’s list.) Evenings, relaxed at the table after dinner, Grandson or Granddaughter would call out, for example, ‘Grandpa! Number 67!’ I made a big deal out of hauling the list from my back pocket, carefully unfolding it, locating the number and reading the title aloud. Then, on to chin-rubbing, head scratching, ceiling staring, and after enough ‘C’mon, grandpa! Get with it!’ from all directions I went into my act, narrating in words, tone, gestures, and body language the events of oft-told ‘Number 67′, or whatever number they had chosen.
They would listen, spellbound and cut in with comments and questions. To them, it was their family history and often, drama, and they really want to know. Invariably, the story was followed with reminiscences by their Mom and Dad who added variations, details, interpretations from their memories, and spin off comparable events in their lives, often long into the wee hours.
Autobiography became living history-the occasion of the telling, itself, is now an event not to be forgotten-and the finest kind of intergenerational communication.
Home Care Services: How to Have a Bit of Fun Every Day
Friday, February 20th, 2009 | home care | No Comments
For the very essence of amusement is the child-spirit. The child throws himself heartily and spontaneously into the game, or whatever it may be, and forgets that there is anything else in the world, for the time being. Children have nothing else to remember. We have the advantage of them there, in the pleasure of forgetting and in the renewed strength with which we can return to our work or care, in consequence. Any one who cannot play children’s games with children, and with the same enjoyment that children have, does not know the spirit of amusement. For this same spirit must be taken into all forms of amusement, especially those that are beyond the childish mind, to bring the delicious reaction which nature is ever ready to bestow.
This is almost a self-evident truth; and yet so confirmed is man in his sham maturity that it is quite common to see one look with contempt, and a sense of superiority which is ludicrous, upon another who is enjoying a child’s game like a child. The trouble is that many of us are so contracted in and oppressed by our own self-consciousness that open spontaneity is out of the question and even inconceivable. The sooner we shake it off, the better. When the great philosopher said, “Except ye become as little children,” he must have meant it all the way through in spirit, if not in the letter. It certainly is the common-sense view, whichever way we look at it, and proves as practical as walking upon one’s feet.
With the spontaneity grows the ability to be amused, and with that ability comes new power for better and really serious work.
To endeavor with all your might to win, and then if you fail, not to care, relieves a game of an immense amount of unnecessary nervous strain. A spirit of rivalry has so taken hold of us and become such a large stone in the way, that it takes wellnigh a reversal of all our ideas to realize that this same spirit is quite compatible with a good healthy willingness that the other man should win–if he can. Not from the goody-goody motive of wishing your neighbor to beat,–no neighbor would thank you for playing with him in that spirit,–but from a feeling that you have gone in to beat, you have done your best, as far as you could see, and where you have not, you have learned to do better. The fact of beating is not of paramount importance. Every man should have his chance, and, from your opponent’s point of view, provided you were as severe on him as you knew how to be at the time, it is well that he won. You will see that it does not happen again.
Curious it is that the very men or women who would scorn to play a child’s game in a childlike spirit, will show the best known form of childish fretfulness and sheer naughtiness in their way of taking a game which is considered to be more on a level with the adult mind, and so rasp their nerves and the nerves of their opponents that recreation is simply out of the question.
Home Care: Beware of a Carer with No Sympathy!
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 | home care | No Comments
A poor man was once brought to the hospital very ill; he had suffered so keenly in the process of getting there that the resulting weakness, together with the intense fright at the idea of being in a hospital, which is so common to many of his class, added to the effects of his disease itself, were too much for him, and he died before he had been in bed fifteen minutes. The nurse in charge looked at him and said, in a cold, steady tone:–
“It was hardly worth while to make up the bed.”
She had hardened herself because she could not endure the suffering of unwholesome sympathy, and yet “must do her work.” No one had taught her the freedom and power of true sympathy. Her finer senses were dulled and atrophied,–she did not know the difference between one human soul and another. She only knew that this was a case of typhoid fever, that a case of pneumonia, and another a case of delirium tremens. They were all one to her, so far as the human beings went. She knew the diagnosis and the care of the physical disease,–and that was all. She did the material work very well, but she must have brought torture to the sensitive mind in many a poor, sick body.
Care for the Elderly: Can You Sleep Peacefully?
Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 | home care | No Comments
When we lie down at night and become conscious that our arms and our legs and our whole bodies are resting heavily upon the bed, we are letting go all the resistance which has been left stored in our muscles from the activities of the day.
A cat, when she lies down, lets go all resistance at once, because she moves with the least possible effort; but there are very few men who do that, and so men go to their rest with more or less resistance stored in their bodies, and they must go through a conscious process of dropping it before they can settle to sleep as a normal child does, without having to think about how it is done. The conscious process, however, brings a quiet, conscious joy in the rest, which opens the mind to soothing influences, and brings a more profound refreshment than is given even to the child–and with the refreshment new power for work.
One word more about outside disturbances before we turn to those interior ones which are by far the most common preventatives of refreshing sleep. The reader will say: “How can I be willing that the noise should go on when I am not willing?” The answer is, “If you can see clearly that if you were willing, the noises would not interfere with your sleep, then you can find the ability within you to make yourself willing.”
It is wonderful to realize the power we gain by compelling and controlling our desires or aversions through the intelligent use of the will, and it is easier to compel ourselves to do right against temptation than to force ourselves to do wrong against a true conviction. Indeed it is most difficult, if not impossible, to force ourselves to do wrong against a strong sense of right.
Behind an our desires, aversions, and inclinations each one of us possesses a capacity for a higher will, the exercise of which, on the side of order and righteousness, brings into being the greatest power in human life. The power of character is always in harmony with the laws of truth and order, and although we must sometimes make a great effort of the will to do right against our inclinations the ease of such effort increases as the power of character increases, and strength of will grows steadily by use, because it receives its life from the eternal will and is finding its way to harmony with that.
Home Care Nurse: Make Sure You Get Enough Rest
Friday, February 6th, 2009 | home care | No Comments
The rest-instinct is most generally disobeyed, most widely needed, and obedience to it would bring the most effective results. A restful state of mind and body prepares one for the best effects from exercise, fresh air, and nourishment. This instinct is the more disobeyed because with the need for rest there seems to come an inability to take it, so that not only is every impediment magnified, but imaginary impediments are erected, and only a decided and insistent use of the will in dropping everything that interferes, whether real or imaginary, will bring a whiff of a breeze from the true rest-current.
Rest is not always silence, but silence is always rest; and a real silence of the mind is known by very few. Having gained that, or even approached it, we are taken by the rest-wind itself, and it is strong enough to bear our full weight as it swings us along to renewed life and new strength for work to come.
The secret is to turn to silence at the first hint from nature; and sleep should be the very essence of silence itself.
All this would be very well if we were free to take the right amount of rest, fresh air, exercise, and nourishment; but many of us are not. It will not be difficult for any one to call to mind half a dozen persons who impede the good which might result from the use of these four necessities simply by complaining that they cannot have their full share of either. Indeed, some of us may find in ourselves various stones of this sort stopping the way.
To take what we can and be thankful, not only enables us to gain more from every source of health, but opens the way for us to see clearly how to get more. This complaint, however, is less of an impediment than the whining and fussing which come from those who are free to take all four in abundance, and who have the necessity of their own especial physical health so much at heart that there is room to think of little else. These people crowd into the various schools of physical culture by the hundred, pervade the rest-cures, and are ready for any new physiological fad which may arise, with no result but more physical culture, more rest-cure, and more fads. Nay, there is sometimes one other result,–disease. That gives them something tangible to work for or to work about. But all their eating and breathing and exercising and resting does not bring lasting vigorous health, simply because they work at it as an end, of which self is the centre and circumference.
The sooner our health-instinct is developed, and then taken as a matter of course, the sooner can the body become a perfect servant, to be treated with true courtesy, and then forgotten. Here is an instinct of our barbarous ancestry which may be kept and refined through all future phases of civilization. This instinct is natural, and the obedience to it enables us to gain more rapidly in other, higher instincts which, if our ancestors had at all, were so embryonic as not to have attained expression.
Nourishment, fresh air, exercise, rest,–so far as these are not taken simply and in obedience to the natural instinct, there arise physical stones in the way, stones that form themselves into an apparently insurmountable wall. There is a stile over that wall, however, if we will but open our eyes to see it. This stile, carefully climbed, will enable us to step over the few stones on the other side, and follow the physical path quite clearly.
Home Nurse: True and False Human Sympathy
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 | home care | No Comments
A NURSE who had been only a few weeks in the hospital training-school, once saw–from her seat at the dinner-table–a man brought into the house who was suffering intensely from a very severe accident. The young woman started up to be of what service she could, and when she returned to the table, had lost her appetite entirely, because of her sympathy for the suffering man. She had hardly begun her dinner, and would have gone without it if it had not been for a sharp reprimand from the superintendent.
“If you really sympathize with that man,” she said, “you will eat your dinner to get strength to take care of him. Here is a man who will need constant, steady, _healthy_ attention for some days to come,–and special care all this afternoon and night, and it will be your duty to look out for him. Your ’sympathy’ is already pulling you down and taking away your strength, and you are doing what you can to lose more strength by refusing to eat your dinner. Such sympathy as that is poor stuff; I call it weak sentimentality.”
The reprimand was purposely sharp, and, by arousing the anger and indignation of the nurse, it served as a counter-irritant which restored her appetite. After her anger had subsided, she thanked the superintendent with all her heart, and from that day she began to learn the difference between true and false sympathy. It took her some time, however, to get thoroughly established in the habit of healthy sympathy. The tendency to unwholesome sympathy was part of her natural inheritance, along with many other evil tendencies which frequently have to be overcome before a person with a very sensitive nervous system can find his own true strength.
But as she watched the useless suffering which resulted in all cases in which people allowed themselves to be weakened by the pain of others, she learned to understand more and more intelligently the practice of wholesome sympathy, and worked until it had become her second nature. Especially did she do this after having proved many times, by practical experience, the strength which comes through the power of wholesome sympathy to those in pain.
Caring for the Elderly: Grandparent’s Role
Monday, February 2nd, 2009 | home care | No Comments
Grandparents generally accept and enjoy the many roles into which they have been cast. One of the many is that they are the grandparents of all their grandchildren, not just of one whom they chose to be their favorite. Favoritism invites disaster.
A young mother of two posed the following dilemma to an Internet discussion group devoted to family relations and child behavior. I altered the text slightly, primarily to protect the writer’s privacy. She wrote:
‘Since the birth of our second child our family has received lots of warm wishes. Yet, often, in offering congratulations, well wishers remarked along the lines ‘You must be happy to have a boy now.’ This confused our older child, a four-year-old girl.
‘Of course, she is a much loved and cherished child and we could not love her any more if she were a boy. And we are very happy to have our new son, but would have loved a second daughter just as much. But the casual remarks about having a son are secondary to my concern about my parents’ relationship with our children.
‘My parents reside within easy driving distance and we are a close-knit family. Rarely a week passes that we and my parents don’t do something together. They are my daughter’s primary baby-sitters and are very generous toward her.
‘However, I am starting to see that there will be a difference, based solely on gender, in my parents’ treatment of both children. When my son was barely a week old, my father said that he was looking forward to taking him fishing. When I remarked that my daughter had a fishing pole and, due to the age difference between her and her brother, would be a more appropriate companion, still no invitation was forthcoming.
‘When my father invited my husband fishing the following week, my father grumbled at the suggestion that they take my daughter along.
‘My son is now two and a half months old, and my father is looking forward to participating with him in Little League, soccer, etc. Again, both my husband and I chimed in that the same activities are also available for girls. Silence.
‘What really disturbs me is that after these rebuffs my daughter sometimes quietly says to me, ‘Mama, I am proud we both are girls.’ I don’t know where she gets this from, but she’ll often repeat it several times and in more of a forlorn tone than an enthusiastic one.’
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