If there is one thing that those dealing with a loved one’s dementia can understand, it’s helpful empathy. While those around us who sympathize and want to be of assistance mean their best, we find ourselves wondering how they could help and then thank them and walk away, without actually taking advantage. The reason we don’t is because we’re playing it by ear and the small amount of stress can easily break our stride. It doesn’t mean we aren’t grateful, it means we’re actually in the dark, still, and needing to help someone else may be too much at that particular time.
With Helpful Empathy, there is a light and understanding that there is a hand held out with answers and possible solutions to our needs; solutions we may have never even considered having a problem for, but then those problems do arise and we look for answers or remember them from something we read. This is a book of Helpful Empathy.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about another book, Sundown Dementia, Vascular Dementia and Lewy Body Dementia...by Lindsay Leatherdale, which gave great information and resources. Other books, such as Living with Lewy Body Dementia: the caregiver's personal, in-depth experience by Judy Towne Jennings PT, MA.,and A Caregiver's Guide to Lewy Body Dementia by Helen Buell Whitworth and James Whitworth., gave us information we could use, along with anecdotes and very good information. However, You Oughta Know, by Sandra Ross (author of the previously reviewed Going Gentle Into That Good Night) gives us not only more information but strategies and ideas as to how to implement them.
Because Ms. Ross has already gone down the road of Lewy Body Dementia with her mother, she kept notes and speaks to the reader about different stages and platforms of dementia, and what might be required in handling those effectively for the patient. She talks about balance, walkers, bathing, sundowning, and most avenues those who are caring or dealing with patients would need or may need to walk at some point.
But it’s not just the information she provides that makes this Helpful Empathy - it’s that she does it while putting in the relevance of her experience - she’s not overly chatty, but she lends the experiences she’s had to the strategy or issue and how she was best able to deal with it, along with some other ideas. There is a relevance to her ideas, and I find this reassuring and it is also calming, spiritually.
While not all the ideas in this book will work with my mother or some others, but there are ideas herein that lend themselves to helping figure out ways to get her to bathe, to help her move, and learning more about what something she is having troubles with means.
She begins the text with what dementia is, and further she discusses how it must feel for the patient. This is a wonderful methodology that takes it away from what is typically clinical and dry. While the books reviewed earlier are not necessarily dry, this is a book in which I found comfort and solace while soaking in the information.
This is a book to keep nearby, along with the others mentioned, as resource and a go-to guide/manual.
I am grateful to find something that I can call Helpful Empathy; I’m holding it in my hands and it is a keeper.
No comments:
Post a Comment