Carers are particularly vulnerable to feeling stressed, worried and worn down by the vast demands that often come with caregiving, be they physical, psychological or emotional. Mindfulness can be enormously beneficial to carers, whether professional or voluntary, as a means of developing greater inner stability, resilience and gaining more control over their thoughts, feelings and emotions. Mindfulness is an evidence-based approach that is proven to help protect against stress, anxiety, depression and burnout. Dr Cheryl Rezek provides an accessible introduction to mindfulness, and explains how simple mindfulness practices and psychological concepts can be used to manage the day-to-day demands of caring effectively, helping caregivers to gain a greater sense of control and maintain a more positive and balanced outlook. The book includes easy-to-use and enjoyable mindfulness exercises, short enough to fit into a busy day, as well as accompanying audio tracks to support and guide the reader through these exercises. An essential read for all those involved in caring for people with acute or long-term health and mental health conditions, disabilities and other support needs, including relatives and other informal carers, adoptive parents and foster carers, as well as professional medical, health and social care staff.

Those who care for the ailing, whether helping someone recover, grapple with a long-term disability, or face a terminal illness, often feel alone, overwhelmed, exhausted. William and Nancy Martin have worked as counselors, hospice trainers, and Zen guides -- and as caregivers themselves. With empathy and insight, they offer readers solace drawn from the eternal wisdom of the "Tao Te Ching."
Like the original Chinese text, this book contains eighty-one chapters. Each chapter includes a poem for caregivers, evocative of the verses of the "Tao Te Ching," followed by a reflection that presents practical guidance for navigating the emotional and physical hardships of caregiving. The resulting resource gently awakens readers to the grace, growth, and even joy possible at each step along their path.

As our population ages, more and more of us find ourselves caring for parents and loved ones _ some 8.8 million people in the UK. An invisible army of carers holding families together.

Here, Kate Mosse tells her personal story of finding herself as a carer in middle age: first, helping her mother look after her beloved father through Parkinson's, then supporting her mother in widowhood, and finally as 'an extra pair of hands' for her 90-year-old mother-in-law.

This is a story about the gentle heroism of our carers, about small everyday acts of tenderness, and finding joy in times of crisis. It's about juggling priorities, mind-numbing repetition, about guilt and powerlessness, about grief, and the solace of nature when we're exhausted or at a loss. It is also about celebrating older people, about learning to live differently _ and think differently about ageing.

But most of all, it's a story about love..

Working Daughter is a revelatory look at who's caring for our aging population and how these unpaid family caregivers are trying to manage caring for their parents, raising their children, and pursuing their careers. It tells the story of one woman who was enjoying a fast-paced career in marketing and raising two children, until both of her parents were diagnosed with terminal illnesses on the same day. In the challenges she faced and the choices she made, readers will learn how they can navigate their own caregiving experience and/or prepare for when they are inevitably called on to care for their parents. Working Daughter sparks the conversation we so desperately need to have about women and the workplace. With 10,000 people turning 65 every day and a shortage of caregivers predicted in the next few years, it's time we talk about how family caregivers and their employers will face the impact of a rapidly aging society. This book fills the gap in the literature on women and work; there are volumes of books about managing career and children, but little advice on how to balance career and parents. Working Daughter provides a blueprint for women and a call to action for business leaders and policy makers. This is book is for women who want straight talk and real advice about the challenges of eldercare, the choices they will need to make, the aspects of caregiving they can control, and that which they cannot. And finally, Working Daughter shows family caregivers how they can achieve, the underreported but well-documented upside to caring for an aging parent, the caregiver's gain.

Caring for a sick child or relative at home can be a daunting task, especially if longer-term care is involved. Advice on the best remedies and how to structure your care can be invaluable. This book covers all aspects of general home nursing, including the arrangement of the patient's room, meals, taking a temperature, and washing the patient. It also details numerous holistic treatments including herbal and plant remedies, baths, foot-baths, compresses and poultices. There are specific sections on pregnancy, birth, sleep, nursing the terminally ill and death. This is a comprehensive guide to holistic home care for those nursing children and adults through an illness.

A practical, empowering guide to navigating your partner's diagnosis of a terminal or life-limiting illness, or death. Receiving the news that your partner has a terminal or life-limiting illness, or has died unexpectedly, is among the worst experiences in life. At a time when you are least able to cope, you are faced with a multitude of difficult decisions, some of which must be made quickly. What you need is a friend who has experienced everything you are about to face, who can support you as you navigate some tough, important choices. This book is that friend. There is plenty of information out there but where to start looking? What information is needed and how can it be accessed? What decisions are essential in the immediate term and what can be left until later? Throughout the book, the emphasis is on protecting and supporting those left behind by presenting almost every choice you may need to make and the possible implications of each decision. You will learn: - The importance of creating a will, arranging power of attorney, organising advanced decisions of treatment, and even getting married or entering a civil partnership - What you are entitled to from the state, the NHS and your employer - How to stabilise your finances and prepare to run a household alone - Where your partner ought to be during treatment and/or palliative care, and how to go about achieving this - Which decisions need to be made after death, from planning the funeral to accessing your partner's estate - How to navigate the grieving process and take control of a happy future No matter where you are in the process, How to Survive Losing a Loved One is a comprehensive, practical and empowering guide to coping with your partner's terminal illness and death, and building the next chapter in your life.

A caregiver's journey often contains beliefs and behaviors that act like emotional landmines and can cause serious damage. Avoiding these landmines, while finding a path to safety, requires caregivers to hear from someone with experience they can trust. Author and radio host Peter Rosenberger draws upon three decades of caring for his wife through a medical nightmare to discuss seven caregiver landmines that wreak havoc in a caregiver's life. Helping them navigate to a place of safety, 7 Caregiver Landmines: And How You Can Avoid Them equips fellow caregivers to live a healthier, calmer, and even more joyful life-because "Healthy Caregivers Make Better Caregivers!"

Overwhelmed by handling your aging loved one's affairs? Is your parents' estate in good order? Do you know what their wishes are and how you can honor them? Are you struggling with where your parent can be best cared for following a hospital stay? Are you feeling guilty or manipulated by your family? Using real life examples, Aging in Place is instrumental in promoting healthy family discourse on these important topics. Mary Mashburn discusses the roadblocks and pitfalls you and your family might encounter, explains many useful planning techniques, and provides information on local and national resources. Whether in the midst of a crisis or just beginning to discuss options with loved ones, you gain valuable insight and information that guides you and your family toward making the best choices that fit your unique situation. Rather than offering a magic wand to make the difficulties of aging disappear, Aging in Place offers useful information to make decisions that provide peace and strength as those who are aging and their loved ones face these challenges together.

Loss and Grief: Personal Stories of Doctors and Other Healthcare Professionals is a unique collection of personal narratives that chronicle the journeys of doctors and other healthcare professionals who have been personally impacted by life-altering losses. Edited by internationally recognized practitioners of supportive care medicine and grief counseling, these are unflinching, first-person narratives of authors walking in their own shoes. The narratives reveal losses of cherished loved ones, integrity, dreams, naive views of colleagues, and the lack of institutional support for these inevitable experiences. Although the narrators are well-established leaders in their fields, serious loss brought each back to the exposed core of their most basic selves. They learned that the professional veneer was too thin to be instructive or protective. Readers might resonate with their own painful experiences and memories, and others might wonder how they will imagine their own future when these inevitable aspects of being human-loss and grief-strike them, too. In Loss and Grief, it is our hope that such openly shared feelings of isolation and suffering will humanize the loss experience, ignite prospective discussions, and illuminate opportunities for education, research and interventions to prepare us for multiple loss experiences endemic to life.

Home parenteral nutrition (HPN) is the intravenous administration of nutrients carried out in the patient's home. This book analyses current practices in HPN, with a view to inform best practice, covering epidemiology of HPN in regions including the UK and Europe, USA and Australia, its role in the treatment of clinical conditions including gastrointestinal disorders and cancer, ethical and legal aspects and patient quality of life.

Sensory Stories contain just a few lines of text, and are brought to life through a selection of meaningful sensory experiences. They have been found to be highly effective in helping care for people with dementia, and can enable them to engage with their memories, life history and more, in a way that would otherwise not be possible. Despite these benefits, there is very little guidance on how to incorporate this approach in everyday care. This book looks at how sensory engagement can help someone with dementia feel safe and secure, minimise their anxieties, support their cognitive abilities, as well as other benefits. Full of practical advice, this book provides everything you need to put Sensory Stories into practice. Written at a level suitable for both family members and practitioners, this innovative book will be invaluable for anyone supporting a person with dementia.

More than 400,000 people in the United States undergo kidney dialysis. If you or a member of your family are one of them, then the prospect of a regular appointment with a dialysis machine may seem like the end of life itself. But that reaction couldn't be more wrong.
In Dialysis Without Fear, psychiatrist and dialysis patient Dr. Daniel Offer joins with his wife, Marjorie Kaiz Offer, and daughter, Susan Offer Szafir, to reveal how life can be lived--and lived well--on dialysis. Drawing on his long medical career and more than seven years of personal experience with dialysis, Dr. Offer dispels many misconceptions surrounding this treatment, explaining how you can adapt to the new diet, travel, work and continue to partake in life's joys and celebrations. But the fears and hardships can be quite real, and Dr. Offer brings his years as a psychiatrist to bear as he provides practical advice on how patients can overcome them. Walking through each step of dialysis, he explains different types of treatment, examines the pros and cons of a transplant, and discusses side effects. Since dialysis affects the entire family, Dr. Offer and his coauthors also provide realistic insights into how relatives can cope and thrive together, sharing the humor, courage, and triumphs of real families who have successfully faced the challenges of dialysis. The result is an inspiring, practical guide that will help you and your family learn to overcome the difficulties of dialysis, live without fear, and enjoy every day.

Dementia is increasingly being recognised as a public health priority and poses one of the largest challenges we face as a society. At the same time, there is a growing awareness that the quest for a cure for Alzheimer's disease and other causes of dementia needs to be complemented by efforts to improve the lives of people with dementia. To gain a better understanding of dementia and of how to organize dementia care, there is a need to bring together insights from many different disciplines. Filling this knowledge gap, this book provides an integrated view on dementia resulting from extensive discussions between world experts from different fields, including medicine, social psychology, nursing, economics and literary studies. Working towards a development of integrative policies focused on social inclusion and quality of life, Dementia and Society reminds the reader that a better future for persons with dementia is a collective responsibility.

'Uplifting and honest, [Tender is] about resilience and learning to look after oneself so as to be better able to care for others.' KATE MOSSE 'A beautiful and important book that is both deeply engaging and usefully practical. I loved it.' CATHY RENTZENBRINK 'An insightful and well-timed book ... forces us to confront the stereotypes - and prejudices - we hold.' SUNDAY TIMES 'profoundly important...full of wisdom and bright insights on what it really means to love someone, by a fearless and generous writer. ' CLOVER STROUD 'A beautiful and timely reminder that each and every one of us has the ability to care, the capacity for empathy, and the potential to grow.' ANDY PUDDICOMBE, FOUNDER OF HEADSPACE 'A wonderful book: compassionate, honest, carefully-reasoned and genuinely helpful... This will benefit many people.' KATHERINE MAY, author of WINTERING 'An invaluable tool for any invisible carers or anyone who wants to learn how to better support their loved ones... we ALL have many, many things to learn from Penny's beautiful, wise, charming, thoughtful words' - SCARLETT CURTIS, Sunday Times bestselling author 'Moving and beautifully written, nuanced and wise, alert to every paradox at the heart of love. A hugely important book not only for current or future carers, but anyone learning to accept that life tends to resist our control.' - OLIVIA SUDJIC, author of EXPOSURE 'Tender captures the powerful capacity of people to care for others, and all the heartbreaking and heartwarming complexity that this involves. Penny brings the crucial, yet often overlooked, role of caring into our collective consciousness and, in doing so, demonstrates what it means to be human.' -DR EMMA HEPBURN, author of A TOOLKIT FOR MODERN LIFE 'Penny Wincer's TENDER manages to combine both unromanticised honesty about the realities of care with a genuine uplifting hopefulness... is a must-read.'- RUTH WHIPPMAN, author of THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS We are all likely - at some point in our lives - to face the prospect of caring for another, whether it's a parent, child or partner. It is estimated that there are 7 million people in the UK caring for loved ones. And yet these are the unpaid, unsung people whose number is rising all the time. In Tender: the imperfect art of caring, Penny Wincer combines her own experiences as a carer with the experiences of others to offer real and transformative tools and insights for navigating a situation that many of us are either facing or will face at some time. Penny Wincer has twice been a carer: first to her mother, and now as a single parent to her autistic son. Tender shows how looking after oneself is a fundamental part of caring for another, and describes the qualities that we can look to cultivate in ourselves through what may otherwise feel to be an exhausting task. Weaving her lived experience with research into resilience, perfectionism and self-compassion, Penny combines the stories of other carers alongside those who receive support - offering an often surprising and hopeful perspective. Penny hosts a podcast Not Too Busy To Write.

Ann Burack-Weiss explores a rich variety of published memoirs by authors who cared for ill or disabled family members. Contrary to the common belief that caregiving is nothing more than a stressful situation to be endured, memoirs describe a life transforming experience-self-discovery, a reordering of one's priorities, and a changed view of the world. "The Caregiver's Tale" offers insight and comfort to individuals caring for a loved one and is a valuable resource for all health care professionals.

Identifying common themes, Burack-Weiss describes how the illness career and social meaning of cancer, dementia, HIV/AIDS, mental illness, and chemical dependence affect the caregiving experience. She applies the same method to an examination of family roles: parents caring for ailing children, couples and siblings caring for one another, and adult children caring for aging parents.

Jamaica Kincaid, Sue Miller, Paul Monette, Kenzaburo O?, and Philip Roth are among the many authors who share their caregiving stories. Burack-Weiss provides an annotated bibliography of the more than one hundred memoirs and an accompanying chart to help readers locate those of greatest interest to them.

This indispensable guide aims to be a one-stop-shop for the huge percentage of the population who, now or later, find themselves in a caring role, whether that involves shopping for a housebound neighbour, or giving up work to care full-time for a disabled child or confused parent. This book will also help carers care for themselves. It looks at the difficult feelings that go hand in hand with caring, including how relationships are affected. There's guidance on what to do when a carer stops coping, and how to prepare emotionally and practically for the time when caring comes to an end.

Most families have "skeletons" in the closet. For my wife's family, there was a Monster, a type of dementia that robs loving, intelligent individuals of everything-their dignity, their personality, their memory, their finances, and their minds. The "skeletons" are the remains of loved ones after the Monster has finished with them. The family members who are not devoured by this beast are, even so, crippled and maimed by its effects on their loved ones. Little did I know when Evelyn and I married in 1970 that this "Jabberwock" would come a'calling on us. My wife at age 60 is now vastly gone, with no memory of her children, or me, or our life together. To our horror, one of our children has tested positive for the autosomal dominant (inherited) gene that is the pathway for the dementia Monster's entrance. We pray for a cure. Dementia: The Monster Within is not an extensive explanation of dementia, although we show some of the science involved to help give understanding. It is first and foremost the story of our family, along with the stories of a few others who have met the Monster. Our experiences may be helpful in recognizing the initial assault. This book also provides a framework of essential steps necessary to prepare both caregiver and loved one for their futures. Most importantly, if you have been affected by this Monster, you should understand that you are not alone in your struggle. There is an enormous responsibility in giving balance when sharing hope of curing these diseases. It would be unconscionable to offer false hope. Yet, there is every reason to have hope. As we write, clinical trials are being conducted for treatments, but each individual needs to be realistic-not every disease will be "cured" before causing harm to some of our loved ones. Tens of thousands of scientists in hundreds of research facilities around the world are making discoveries about dementia almost daily. Some of these discoveries will lead to treatments, and some will lead to cures of some of the dementias. This enormous investment in research will pay off with dynamic discoveries. We cannot give up hope that the future holds a way to ... SLAY THE MONSTER

Genuine, life-giving spirituality calls us to be our best selves and to bring out the best in others, each and every day. It calls us to care_for God, others, and ourselves. In Practicing Presence, popular spiritual writer Kerry Walters shows us how to integrate care into our daily lives on the road to happiness and holiness. As Walters reveals, we do not need to be professional caregivers to nurture a creative, intimate, and meaningful openness to our deepest selves, to others, and to God. We simply need to be OpresentO to who God is and who we are as images of God.

Mary Ellen Geist decided to leave her job as a CBS Radio anchor to return home to Michigan when her father's Alzheimer's got to be too much for her mother to shoulder alone. She chose to live her life by a different set of priorities: to be guided by her heart, not by outside accomplishment and recognition.
The New York Times wrote a front page story about Mary Ellen on Thanksgiving 2005. It was one of the most e-mailed stories for the month. Mary Ellen also kept a blog of her experiences, which received an enormous response from readers on WCBS880.com. Through her own story and through interviews with doctors and other women who've followed the "Daughter Track"--leaving a job to care for an aging parent--Geist offers eye-opening advice. She shares emotional insights on how to encourage interaction with the loved one you're caring for; how to determine daily tasks that are achievable and rewarding; how the personality of the patient affects the caregiving and the progression of the disease; as well as invaluable advice about how the reader can take care of themselves while accomplishing the Herculean task of constant caregiving to others.
Geist's years in journalism allow her to report on Boomers' caretaking dilemmas with professional objectivity, and her warm voice brings compassion and insight to one of the most difficult stituations a son or daughter may face during his or her life.

ABOUT THIS BOOK This book is written by an insider. A hospital administrator and practitioner who participated firsthand in laying the foundation for today's collapsing heath care system. A practitioner who then went on to make radical changes in the way he practiced his profession and his philosophy of health care delivery. A practitioner who is now hell-bent on making radical changes in this disastrous health care system he helped to create 30 years ago. This book is an insider's look at the sequence of events and decisions that led to the demise of our health care system. This book is designed to educate you to: