alzheimers – Pulse

My Mother’s Keeper

Marjorie Ordene August 11, 2023 13 Comments

It is a mitzvah to take care of your parents: “Honor thy father and thy mother.” And caring for people comes naturally to me. I’m a physician; this is what I do.

But when my father looked to me to cure my eighty-five-year-old mother’s dementia, saying, “You’re the doctor! Help her!” I knew he was asking too much.

And yet. How could I stand idly by while my mother’s mental acuity slowly drained away?

My Alzheimer’s Story

Lisa Burr May 26, 2023 12 Comments

My name is Lisa Burr. I am a family nurse practitioner, and have been for nearly three decades. I grew up in California, the “Sunshine State.”

In the 1960s, my dad, a military test pilot, was the first astronaut with NASA’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) program, which pioneered crewed space stations as reconnaissance satellites. My mother was a beautiful model.

Love Is the Key

Ann Beach December 30, 2022 5 Comments

Collecting dust on the rustic wooden shelves above a sturdy workbench in my basement are models of history-making ships, spaceships and military fighter planes. There’s an enormous replica of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, complete with iconic NASA logo and a massive orange fuel tank nestled next to its launch tower. Not far off is a black-and-brown plastic replica of the forty-four-gun frigate USS Constitution, its hull held together by two gigantic bolts.

Anatomy

Barry H. Gordon November 4, 2022 No Comments

I find him sitting
in the midst of his fellow residents
in the dining room
that doubles as an activity space.

His eyes are fixed
on the TV screen
that has a photo

The Memory Unit

Ann Anderson Evans April 19, 2019 1 Comment

Ann Anderson Evans ~

I arrive in the memory unit at 1:30 in the afternoon. Jean, my mother’s sister, is fast asleep in her hospital bed in Room 1410. For the past ten years, it has fallen to me to be her frequent visitor and care monitor. I do this willingly because without her generosity and compassion, my life would have been far less meaningful and enjoyable. She never married, but my brothers and I honored her on Mother’s Day. My brothers sometimes drive here from their distant homes for a bedside family reunion.

During her decades of charitable work, Jean was named Recycler of the Decade by the New Jersey Department of the Environment, received the New Jersey Pride Award from

alzheimer’s

Billy Antonio December 15, 2017 2 Comments

Braak Stage IV

Roberta Beary April 7, 2017 1 Comment

Roberta Beary

About the artist:

Roberta Beary is the 2017 Roving Ambassador for the Haiku Foundation, and haibun editor for Modern Haiku. The author of two award-winning poetry collections, The Unworn Necklace and Deflection, she writes to connect with the disenfranchised, to let them know they are not alone. A photographer since her Polaroid Swinger days, she now uses her iPad to link her poems with images. More of her visual work can be viewed on Twitter @shortpoemz.

Standing Up by Speaking Up

Jenny Kwak March 2, 2017 No Comments

My parents immigrated to the U.S. from Korea when I was two, in 1972. We were lucky we left when we did, or my father, a pro-democracy professor at Korea University during Park Chung-Hee’s regime, might have been jailed. We were also lucky my mother was a pharmacist, as the U.S. was accepting pharmacists and nurses then. We moved to Seattle and made our home there.

Wake-Up Call

Jenni Levy January 15, 2017 6 Comments

After my father died, I made sure I spoke with my mother every day. Dad’s death was sudden, if not entirely surprising, and there were a lot of logistical details to sort out. Mom, at 71, was living alone for the first time in her life. She wasn’t sleeping well. She was anxious. She didn’t understand all the paperwork that flooded into the house. I wasn’t surprised that she forgot things; she was overwhelmed with grief. And she’d never been good with technology; when she decided the phones in the house weren’t working and replaced them for the third time in a year, we just rolled our eyes. I brushed off suggestions from my brother that she might actually have a problem with her memory. Of

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A Beacon of Hope

Danyelle Roan December 13, 2016 No Comments

I never realized the importance of surrounding myself with people in need of hope until I experienced a difficult time in my life, a time when I needed to lean on others to find hope and solace.

During the fall semester of my sophomore year in college, I suffered the loss of my grandma to lung cancer. I became wracked with guilt, anxiety and depression following the death of this essential member of my family. When I was informed of my grandma’s terminal illness, I had joined a support group; in this group, I cried and yelled until I came to accept that my grandma would not live to see me graduate from college or medical school or witness any of the milestones I’d

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Leaving a Little Sparkle Everywhere I Go

Kenna Koehler December 4, 2016 1 Comment

“You have glitter on your face,” my grandmother reminded me for the tenth time that afternoon. Though she was relatively early in the Alzheimer’s process, to us it seemed that she was losing something every single day, and today it appeared to be her short term memory.

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Descent….Variations on a Williams Theme

Martin Kohn September 18, 2015 8 Comments

Martin Kohn

1.
No cold plums
just the leftover
chocolate ganache
that we left in the fridge
and which I falsely accused
you of eating

Forgive me
as I lick
the sweet plate clean
and look for a magnet
to post this note

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fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: alzheimers

My Mother’s Keeper

My Alzheimer’s Story

Love Is the Key

Anatomy

The Memory Unit

alzheimer’s

Braak Stage IV

Standing Up by Speaking Up

Wake-Up Call

A Beacon of Hope

Leaving a Little Sparkle Everywhere I Go

Descent….Variations on a Williams Theme

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: alzheimers

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