Through the Wilderness of Alzheimer's PDF Download

Author: Robert Simpson
Publisher: Augsburg Books
ISBN: 9781451417111
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Nearly four million Americans have Alzheimer's disease, a debilitating neurological disorder affecting the memory that places great stress on the sufferer as well as the caregivers. Robert and Anne Simpson share the story of Bob's early onset of Alzheimer's in order to give families accurate, firsthand information about the disease and to give support and practical help to both patients and caregivers. Their dramatic story, told from both of their perspectives, uses journal entries, conversations, letters and prayers, to trace the onset, diagnosis, and treatment of the disease. All who are trying to find a way through the wilderness of Alzheimer's will find understanding, compassion, practical advice, and spiritual hope in this story.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Alzheimer's disease
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"A Time For Miracles" offers help targeted to those caring for loved ones at home. In its pages, caregivers - and those who love them - will find help, encouragement, and a virtual companion for the journey, Kathleen Brown writes from experience, but also from her heart, giving readers insight and strategies laced with hope and even humor.

Author: Samantha Harvey
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385529481
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
An Orange Prize Finalist A Man Booker Prize Nominee Winner of the 2009 Betty Trask Prize A Guardian First Book Award Nominee Jake is in the tailspin of old age. His wife has passed away, his son is in prison, and now he is about to lose his past to Alzheimer’s. As the disease takes hold of him, Jake’s memories become increasingly unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive, or long dead? Why is his son imprisoned? And why can’t he shake the memory of a yellow dress and one lonely, echoing gunshot? Like Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, The Wilderness holds us in its grip from the first sentence to the last with the sheer beauty of its language and its ruminations on love and loss.

Author: Carlen Maddux
Publisher: Paraclete Press
ISBN: 1612618766
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
Just days after turning fifty, Martha Maddux, a spirited mother and civic activist, was told she had Alzheimer’s disease. She and husband Carlen felt as though they’d been shoved out of a plane 10,000 feet up, with nothing to grab but themselves. A Path Revealed is not about the fallout from an insidious disease that extended over seventeen years. It is the story of a path of hope emerging during the darkest hours - a path that lifted Carlen and Martha above the devastating symptoms of this disease. Carlen traveled with Martha to the backwoods of Kentucky, where the quiet presence of a Catholic nun revealed a hidden path. He was forced to slow down as he traced this path halfway around the world to Australia, retreated weekends to a monastery, embraced meditation, and landed all alone in Thomas Merton’s cabin. This story conveys a message of hope and joy in the midst of an almost overwhelming tragedy.

Author: Anne Simpson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780989527705
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description
A diagnosis of Alzheimer’s can be a very scary thing, as can the navigation of the progress of the disease. Patients are often anxious and unsure of how to express themselves; caregivers are often thrown into a role that they had not anticipated and are unclear how to proceed or what lies ahead. Anne Simpson, author of Through the Wilderness of Alzheimer’s and experienced Alzheimer’s caregiver has created a curriculum for anyone on a journey with dementia, The curriculum can be used in two formats: a one-day workshop (without patients) or a five-session format that can include patients. Both cover the same material, but patients may be encouraged to share their experiences in the five-session format. The curriculum deliberately allows time for reflection and includes scripture, poetry, photography and song as ways to enable that reflection. This is meant for groups up to 30 persons

Author: Brenda Parris Sibley
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 9780595187829
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
From the creator of the award-winning Web site, "A Year to Remember with My Mother and Alzheimer's Disease", this book brings together Brenda Parris Sibley's poetry, her caregiving journal, and cherished photographs from family albums through the years. Waiting for the Morning, the title which comes from one of her poems, is a memorial to Jessie Lee Parris, a victim of Alzheimer's, and provides helpful information for coping with caregiving, including a bibliography of suggested books for both adults and children, and a webliography of recommended Web sites by organizations, professionals, caregivers, and early-onset Alzheimer's patients.

Author: Deborah A. Forrest
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 9780312241018
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
In a culture that worships youth and beauty, more people than ever will be facing the problems of aging. Perhaps the least understood and most feared of the aging diseases are Alzheimer's and the other neurodegenerative diseases like Huntington's and Parkinson's. Because these diseases destroy the mind as well as the body, they seem to rob the victims of all the qualities that once made them human. They engender a hopelessness in the medical profession and families alike, resulting in a sense that these people are already gone. Yet, in Symphony of Spirits Dr. Forrest shows through her unique experiences as a geriatric care giver that if we acknowledge the spiritual dimension of these patients, the "worthless" last years of people suffering from these types of diseases can be the most valuable. When Dr. Forrest took a temporary position at a geriatric hospital in Atlanta, she trusted her extensive medical training to prepare her for the physical and mental challenges of working with elderly patients suffering with dementia. But she quickly learned it just wasn't enough. Working alongside three unique caregivers, Native American nurses with deeply held spiritual beliefs and an uncompromising respect for all life, Forrest experienced a new way of looking at life and death that valued these special patients as "undiscovered treasures." Through her patients, like Momma Sissy, a 102 year-old African American woman who still worked a farm in South Carolina and Stephen Z., a retired engineer whose wife of 50 years still spoke of their ongoing love for each other, Forrest came to appreciate the special wisdom that comes from living life. Working especially with Aunt Mel, an independent strong-willed elder and Granny Ada, the matriarch of an Appalachian mountain clan, taught Forrest the importance of loving relationships for long-term mental and physical health. In the tradition of Raymond Moody and Deepak Chopra, Dr. Forrest proposes a momentary suspension of scientific skepticism and prejudice for a more poignant, humanizing method of caring for Alzheimer's patients.

Author: Thomas DeBaggio
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743261186
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Adeptly navigating between elegy and celebration, fear and determination, confusion and clarity, DeBaggio delivers an exquisitely moving and inspiring book that will resonate with all those who have grappled with their own or their loved ones' memory loss and with death. With his first memoir, Losing My Mind, Thomas DeBaggio stunned readers by laying bare his faltering mind in a haunting and beautiful meditation on the centrality of memory to human life, and on his loss of it to early-onset Alzheimer's disease. In this second extraordinary narrative, he confronts the ultimate loss: that of life. And as only DeBaggio could, he treats death as something to honor, to marvel at, to learn from. Charting the progression of his disease with breathtaking honesty, DeBaggio deftly describes the frustration, grief, and terror of grappling with his deteriorating intellectual faculties. Even more affecting, the prose itself masterfully represents the mental vicissitudes of his disease—DeBaggio's fragments of memory, observation, and rumination surface and subside in the reader's experience much as they might in his own mind. His frank, lilting voice and abundant sense of wonder bind these fragments into a fluid and poetic portrait of life and loss. Over the course of the book, DeBaggio revisits many of the people, places, and events of his life, both in his memory and in fact. In a sense, he is saying goodbye, paying his respects to the world as it recedes from him—and it is a poignant irony that even as this happens, he is at the height of his remarkable descriptive powers. In his moments of clarity, his love for life's details only grows deeper and richer: the limestone creek where he has fished for years; his satisfying and lonely herb farming days; the goldfish pond his son designed and built in his backyard in honor of DeBaggio's passion for "any hole in the ground with some liquid in it"; the thirty years in his beloved home in Arlington, Virginia; his early career as a muckraker; the innumerable precious moments spent with his wife and son; his belated grief over his parents' deaths.

Author: Dagmar Christine Albert
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781927626122
Category : Alzheimer's disease
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
John Albert was fifty-four years old when the first symptoms of early onset Alzheimer's appeared. He was a family man who loved life and everything it had to offer. John was an outdoorsman with an ambition to own and develop a small part of British Columbia's wilderness crown land. He succeeded but when he walked on it for the last time, this mind-robbing illness had already left its mark on him. He did not recognize it as "his land" any longer. John battled the aggressive disease for ten years, supported by his family. The day finally came when his wife, Dagmar, had to make the heart-wrenching decision to place her husband in a care facility. Five years later, his condition had progressed to a point where he had to be transferred to the extended care unit of the local hospital. He passed away two years later. John was seventy years old.

Author: Julian Hughes
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191589373
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Dementia is an illness that raises important questions about our own attitudes to illness and aging. It also raises very important issues beyond the bounds of dementia to do with how we think of ourselves as people - fundamental questions about personal identity. Is the person with dementia the same person he or she was before? Is the individual with dementia a person at all? In a striking way, dementia seems to threaten the very existence of the self. This book brings together philosophers and practitioners to explore the conceptual issues that arise in connection with this increasingly common illness. Drawing on a variety of philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, Hume, Wittgenstein, the authors explore the nature of personal identity in dementia. They also show how the lives and selfhood of people with dementia can be enhanced by attention to their psychosocial and spiritual environment. Throughout, the book conveys a strong ethical message, arguing in favour of treating people with dementia with all the dignity they deserve as human beings. The book covers a range of topics, stretching from talk of basic biology to talk of a spiritual understanding of people with dementia. Accessibly written by leading figures in psychiatry and philosophy, the book presents a unique and long overdue examination of an illness that features in so many of our lives.