senior care
Senior Home Care: How Important Is Your Life?
Monday, April 6th, 2009 | home care | No Comments
One’s own life is important; one’s own family and friends are important, very, when taken in their true proportion. One should surely be able to look upon one’s own brothers and sisters as if they were the brothers and sisters of another, and to regard the brothers and sisters of another as one’s own. Singularly, too, real appreciation of and sympathy with one’s own grows with this broader sense of relationship. In no way is this sense shown more clearly than by a mother who has the breadth and the strength to look upon her own children as if they belonged to some one else, and upon the children of others as if they belonged to her. But the triviality of magnifying one’s own out of all proportion has not yet been recognized by many.
So every trivial happening in our own lives or the lives of those connected with us is exaggerated, and we keep ourselves and others in a chronic state of contraction accordingly.
Think of the many trifles which, by being magnified and kept in the foreground, obstruct the way to all possible sight or appreciation of things that really hold a more important place. The cook, the waitress, various other annoyances of housekeeping; a gown that does not suit, the annoyances of travel, whether we said the right thing to so-and-so, whether so-and-so likes us or does not like us,–indeed, there is an immense army of trivial imps, and the breadth of capacity for entertaining these imps is so large in some of us as to be truly encouraging; for if the domain were once deserted by the imps, there remains the breadth, which must have the same capacity for holding something better.
Unfortunately, a long occupancy by these miserable little offenders means eventually the saddest sort of contraction. What a picture for a new Gulliver!–a human being overwhelmed by the imps of triviality, and bound fast to the ground by manifold windings of their cobweb-sized thread.
This exaggeration of trifles is one form of nervous disease. It would be exceedingly interesting and profitable to study the various phases of nervous disease as exaggerated expressions of perverted character. They can be traced directly and easily in many cases. If a woman fusses about trivialities, she fusses more when she is tired. The more fatigue, the more fussing; and with a persistent tendency to fatigue and fussing it does not take long to work up or down to nervous prostration. From this form of nervous excitement one never really recovers, except by a hearty acknowledgment of the trivialities as trivialities, when, with growing health, there is a growing sense of true proportion.
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.
Senior Care: Values and Traditions of Grand Parents
Monday, February 16th, 2009 | home care | No Comments
Many older adults have interests other than family. They work, play golf and other sports, have active social lives and hobbies, and so on. So, indeed, what’s in grandparenting for them?
It depends on how much value a grandparent-and a parent places on family ties and the need for and the flow of intergenerational communications. Where family has meaning, interacting with a far away grandchild adds substance to a ‘value’. Then, as the grandparent ages, communicating with the distant grandchild retains its strength as a positive force, and enriches the remaining years. It reduces loneliness, and is an antidote for apathy and depression. Entering grandparenting with tolerance, constancy, and sincerity adds pleasures to a person’s life. In storytelling, grandparenting invites a call from a distant grandchild to ‘Send me another story,’ or better yet, ‘I’ve got an idea for a story. Let me tell you about it.’
The grandchild chose the grandparent over television and the many other forms of professionally polished commercial entertainment that thrusts forward for his or her attention. In so choosing, the youngster notifies the grandparents through his/her appeal that they, the grandparents, are wanted and needed. It’s Grandchild reaching out and inviting Grandma and Grandpa into his or her world-with affection.
In single-parent families and in families in which both parents work away from home, there might not be as many opportunities to pass along traditions, awareness, and values. Be that as it may, throughout history the family and tribal elders passed their knowledge and codes of conduct on to those who, as part of the natural process, carry the torches into the future. This responsibility to family and community is in the substance of existence.
Senior Care: Start a Dialogue with Your Grand Children
Monday, February 9th, 2009 | home care | No Comments
If you can think a story, and if you can write a letter or express your thoughts orally or visually, then you can combine them into a message to a grandchild. The more often you do it, the easier it becomes. If the mechanics of writing or drawing is the problem, then audiotape. The point is to interact and communicate with a grandchild so that the youngster knows of your caring, and that caring is normal. Grandchild will readily grasp that Grandma or Grandpa wants to share, and that sharing is fine.
The type of communication most desired by my grandchildren until their fifth or sixth years, and under the circumstances of the distance between us, was the letter-story. The written stories evolved out of our infrequent family get-togethers. Occasionally, an idea for a story called for follow- up negotiations over the telephone to clarify plots, scenes, and characters. My grandchildren liked the stories, and both they and I enjoyed the discussions that preceded the writing. The give-and-take stimulated our imaginations and creativity, and often provided me with opportunities to pass along family history.
Today’s youngsters know more about the world than children of previous generations, one of the many benefits of our expanding telecommunication capabilities and greater education and travel opportunities. Youngsters get their view of the world from what they see, hear, and learn from and about their families.
Letter stories, anecdotes and lore give grandchildren a better view of their grandparents, and about what older adults believe. The process, if positive oriented, contributes toward the grandchild’s maturity, and offers them encouragement, values, models, and incentives.
There are tens of thousands of homes across the land where treasured possessions, tangible and otherwise, were created or acquired by the occupants or their forebears. You have them in your home as I do in mine. In time, those possessions: properties and artifacts, along with their histories, will move along to your children and grandchildren. In every culture, ‘grandpa and grandma stories’, along with ‘mom and dad stories,’ are part of that inheritance.
When youngsters know that Grandpa or Grandma wrote a story expressly for them, that more than qualifies the story for the special collection of treasures to be shared with close friends, presented at school as a show-and-tell, and eventually absorbed into the treasured memorabilia of childhood.
Grandchild and grandparent know they enjoy being together, and storytelling is part of the fun; also, grandchildren know that grandmas and grandpas usually have fascinating memories of their childhood and about what happened to the family over the years. Grandchildren want to enter this little bit of grandma and grandpa’s world. Perceptive grandparents see the world through a grandchild’s imagination. Using the anticipation generated by a familiar opening phrase or sentence to set the stage works well for both storyteller and listener.
Grandparent-grandchild interaction is more than a custom; it is a deep and powerful bond. By its very nature, the alliance is biological and cultural, and molded by trial-and-error through the hazards of millennia. It is an alliance not to be treated casually; it demands nourishment, and storytelling by a family’s elders is an essential ingredient.
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.
Senior Care: What Causes Insomnia
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 | home care | No Comments
It is the lower, selfish will that often keeps us awake by causing interior disturbances.
An actor may have a difficult part to play, and feel that a great deal depends upon his success. He stays awake with anxiety, and this anxiety is nothing but resistance to the possibility of failure. The first thing for him to do is to teach himself to be willing to fail. If he becomes willing to fail, then all his anxiety will go, and he will be able to sleep and get the rest and new life which he needs in order to play the part well. If he is willing to fail, then all the nervous force which before was being wasted in anxiety is set free for use in the exercise of his art.
Looking forward to what is going to happen on the next day, or within a few days, may cause so much anxiety as to keep us awake; but if we have a good, clear sense of the futility of resistance, whether our expected success or failure depends on ourselves or on others, we can compel ourselves to a quiet willingness which will make our brains quiet and receptive to restful sleep, and so enable us to wake with new power for whatever task or pleasure may lie before us.
Of course we are often kept awake by the sense of having done wrong. In such cases the first thing to do is to make a free acknowledgment to ourselves of the wrong we have done, and then to make up our minds to do the right thing at once. That, if the wrong done is not too serious, will put us to sleep; and if the next day we go about our work remembering the lesson we have learned, we probably will have little trouble in sleeping.
Senior Care: How Can We Be Free Despite All Those Barriers?
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 | home care | No Comments
INTERIOR freedom rests upon the principle of non-resistance to all the things which seem evil or painful to our natural love of self. But non-resistance alone can accomplish nothing good unless, behind it, there is a strong love for righteousness and truth. By refusing to resist the ill will of others, or the stress of circumstances, for the sake of greater usefulness and a clearer point of view, we deepen our conviction of righteousness as the fundamental law of fife, and broaden our horizon so as to appreciate varying and opposite points of view.
The only non-resistance that brings this power is the kind which yields mere personal and selfish considerations for the sake of principles. Selfish and weak yielding must always do harm. Unselfish yielding, on the other hand, strengthens the will and increases strength of purpose as the petty obstacles of mere self-love are removed. Concentration alone cannot long remain wholesome, for it needs the light of growing self-knowledge to prevent its becoming self-centred.
Yielding alone is of no avail, for in itself it has no constructive power. But if we try to look at ourselves as we really are, we shall find great strength in yielding where only our small and private interests are concerned, and concentrating upon living the broad principles of righteousness which must directly or indirectly affect all those with whom we come into contact.
Senior Care: Elderly People Are the Richest
Monday, January 5th, 2009 | home care | No Comments
There are more than 60 million grandparents in the United States and their numbers are increasing as a portion of the general population. Enormous changes have taken place in longevity and lifestyles since today’s older adults were, themselves, young grandchildren. Experts estimate that there are thirty to fifty thousand living centenarians, up from the 1980 estimate of fifteen thousand. Also, centenarians are not as feeble as they once were; disability rates among older people have been falling since the early 1980s.
Life expectancy at birth in the United States has increased nearly 30 years since the turn of the century, from 47 to about 76. On the other hand, families are more widely dispersed, successful interaction by grandparents with their distant grandchildren, whether for geographic reasons or barriers of circumstance, increasingly calls for innovation and improvisation.
A vast store of practical knowledge as well as a culture’s lore languishes in almost every family, especially among its elders, more than ready to be passed along to succeeding generations. An important source for ideas and models for grandparents to meet the needs-and the yearnings-of this era’s grandchildren and children generally are in the observations and experiences of older adults. It is not up to our young grandchildren to say what in our life’s experiences might be useful or enlightening to them? If it was up to them, how might they draw it out of us? A paradox indeed.
So sometimes it’s really important that we look at the youths through the eyes of our own youth and try to help them, using our life experiences. Remember, wealth grows when shared.
Senior Care: Help Them Be More Independent
Friday, December 5th, 2008 | home care | 1 Comment
How can we make sure that our elderly parents do not end up in a nursing home where they cannot decide on their own what to do and where to go - as usually there is a rigid regime they need to follow?
Well, this is not to say anything against the excellent service nursing homes provide, as sometimes without their help, the lives of many elders would be so much more difficult, and actually some older people are happy to go to such a home, as they can enjoy the presence of the like-minded friends of similar age and life experiences - so why not?
But if your parents like to go for long walks, enjoy the nature, feed little birds, or just go fishing or play golf - why not to enable them do what they like? This is what services of a home care company are for - well-educated and skilled carers will look after elderly people - and actually your Mum or Dad could get a carer who would suit their personality, of a like-minded character, somebody with similar hobbies - the chances are, that there is an ideal carer for every single person.
So why not give it a try and see how your parents, unless you have enough time to spend with them yourself, could benefit from having a friend who would enable them still continue to do what they really enjoy!
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