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Emergency Contact Information Benefits More Than Seniors
Last month, the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration (MVA) announced it has added an emergency contact option to Maryland driver’s licenses.
“Maryland drivers can now add three emergency contacts to their driver’s license so police will know who to call if an accident occurs. The emergency contact information is stored electronically on an individual’s driver’s license and will be available only to authorized law enforcement personnel. You can go to MVA’s website at www.mva.maryland.gov <http://www.mva.maryland.gov/> and add your three emergency contacts in just a few minutes. Go to the website, click “On-line Transactions, then click “More” and then click “Emergency Contacts” to add your emergency contacts.”
This information is only available to police and medical personnel
This new information benefits everyone, young and old alike. The MVA is to be commended for its intelligent use of available technology. The process is similar in many respects to Silver and Amber Alert laws, except in this case the data is collected in advance of the actual need.
The Silver Alert program is patterned after the Amber Alert legislation for tracking missing children, but is focused on seniors with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. Upon notification of a missing older adult, the state police are notified, given a description of the person, vehicle, license number, and area where the person was last known to be. This information, along with a contact number is then posted on highway signs throughout the area. To date, 38 states have passed legislation specifically titled Silver Alert, other legislation substantially the same as silver alert, or broader legislation that encompasses this age group. In most of the remaining states, legislation is in process. A similar bill is pending at the federal level.
Achieving a Longer, Quality Life
If you could live to be 150 years old, would you want to? What if those years were ‘good’ years – extending not only your age, but quality of life as well? In her book, 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith, Sonia Arrison presents a discussion of both dramatic advances in research and medicine, and the philosophical debate that surrounds the subject of helping to increase peoples’ lives.
Writers and philosophers have debated the topic for years. In his book, The Waterworks, E. L. Doctorow, in a fictional story set in the late 1800s, tells of a group of wealthy men who use nefarious means to promote their own longevity.
The writer, Jonathan Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels, has Gulliver visit the nation of Luggnagg where certain of its citizens are born immortal. They are known as struldbrugs. But lest he get too excited, Gulliver learns that being born a strudbrug is a curse. After about 30 years old, “They grew melancholy and dejected.” By 80, they had become, “not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection..”.
The tenor of these writings clearly argues against artificially extending our ‘natural’ life.
Yet as we shift away from storytelling, significant and exciting progress is taking place in genetic, stem cell and other medical research. Scientists are investigating aging from many different directions and coming up with ways to slow the process. Looked at another way, one could say they are researching ways to enhance our life quality, and in the process, extend our lives. And it’s not just for the elderly among us.
One exciting example comes from The Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Researchers there have successfully grown bladders in a lab and implanted them in children with spina bifida. Spina bifida is a condition that causes incomplete closure of the spine and, among other complications, subsequent bladder problems. The basic structures of the bladders were created using biodegradable material. The bladders were then filled with the patients’ stem cells. Once a bladder was grown, it was implanted into the patient. There was no problem with organ rejection since the bladder was made from the patient’s own cells. First performed in 1999, the researchers waited until 2006 to announce their achievement as they wanted to first satisfy themselves that the experiment had worked.
Organ printing is another innovative and exciting development underway. Think of a highly sophisticated printer but instead of being filled with ink, it is filled with cells. Then imagine that instead of paper, the printer is printing onto biodegradable material. The printer prints ‘pages’ of cells on top of one another to make a three dimensional shape. The company, Organovo, announced in 2010 that it had successfully created human blood vessels, and is now working on more complex and larger organs.
These examples are but a narrow glimpse of the diverse approaches to improving our life quality, and, in the process, allowing us to live longer. A Wall Street Journal article, Living to 100 and Beyond, from the August 27-28, 2011 Review, states, “gerontologist and scientific provocateur Aubrey de Grey claims that the first humans to live for 1,000 years may have already been born.” Whether true or not, the astonishing developments in growing replacement organs suggests that far more of us will live to be 100 plus than we ever would have imagined.
Seniors’ Companions Make Travel Possible
Elders want to travel – to vacation, visit family and friends, fulfill a dream, go again to a place in memory. This may seem impossible or difficult at best. He’s blind. She has dementia. He has Alzheimer’s. She can’t go down the street without getting lost, how is she going to make it to the wedding 2,000 miles away?
Given, elder travel is different from the backpacking days of our youth, but it doesn’t have to be gone. Accompanied senior travel makes the world safer, larger, brighter, and a lot more fun for the individual.
A woman we’ll call Michelle contacted our office. Her husband Al had Alzheimer’s Disease and she needed someone with him so he would be safe while she was away at work. His car keys had been taken away, but Al was not one to sit around; he liked to go out and about. And he had one passionate desire: to see Pearl Harbor.
Born in 1925, Al’s father woke him the morning of December 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor had been bombed! “Boy,” he said, “you best go down to the post office and sign up to go fight.” Only 16, Al had to wait a couple of years before serving four years in the army. He later graduated from the University of Maryland, married and raised a family. He was involved in the Boy Scouts, sharing his pride in the “Great U.S. of A.” And someday, he said, he’d see Pearl Harbor.
When our Companion, Gary, met Al, they hit it off immediately. When Gary wasn’t available, his wife and fellow employee Bonnie filled in. (There has to be consistency of care givers or the Alzheimer’s victim gets confused.) Al knew one of them would be there if Michelle couldn’t be.
Al knew he’d never get to Pearl Harbor. Michelle knew differently. She knew she couldn’t handle Al alone, and that she needed a little ‘down-time’ herself. She and Al asked Gary and Bonnie if they would accompany them on a trip to Hawaii. Four months later the four of them left for the two-week cruise. Unexpectedly, Al noticed a gravelly-voice singer on the beach, with a box in front that read, “If inquisitive to hear, put some $ in the box.” Al put money in and sat mesmerized as the singer sang.
Al passed away three years later. But for three years, he had pictures to look at and talk about – from a place in history, a place he always wanted to go to but feared he wouldn’t be able to – with family and friends.
What Gary and Bonnie did with Al and Michelle was a continuation of what they were already doing with their clients, accompanying them wherever they wanted to go. And why not? This trip was just a little longer.
Laughter and Longevity
When I was a kid our family subscribed to The Saturday Evening Post and Reader’s Digest. I especially enjoyed the cartoons in the Post, and Humor in Uniform and Laughter, the Best Medicine in the Digest. I cannot tell you how many times my mother would say to me, “If I have to explain it to you, it won’t be funny.” Yet somehow my sense of humor grew and developed. For most of my adult life I’ve been a regular subscriber to The New Yorker. The cartoons alone are worth the price.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox had it figured out when her poem, “Solitude”, was published in 1883. Here is the first stanza:
Laugh, and the world laughs with you:
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth
Must borrow its mirth,
It has trouble enough of its own.
Especially as we age, it’s easy to get caught up in life’s daily stresses. Physical ailments, retirement worries, illness of a friend or elderly neighbor down the street – the list goes on. Yet research has shown that people who laugh live longer. According to Sven Svebak of the medical school at Norwegian University of Science and Technology, adults who have a sense of humor outlive those who don’t find life funny, and the survival edge is particularly large for people with cancer.
He released his study of about 54,000 Norwegians, tracked for seven years, at the 2007 American Psychosomatic Society meeting in Budapest, Hungary. The greater a role humor played in their lives, the greater their chances of surviving the seven years. Adults who scored in the top quarter for humor appreciation were 35 percent more likely to be alive than those in the bottom quarter, he says.
In a subgroup of 2,015 who had a cancer diagnosis at the start, a great sense of humor cut someone’s chances of death by about 70 percent compared with adults with a poor sense of humor.
Like your muscles, your brain needs regular workouts to stay healthy and fit as you age. Because just as we lose some muscle as we get older, so can our brains atrophy The brain’s “cognitive reserve”— its ability to withstand neurological damage due to aging and other factors without showing visible signs of slowing or memory loss — diminishes through the years. That can make it more difficult to perform mental tasks. But, just as weight workouts add lean muscle to your body and help you retain more muscle in your later years, researchers now believe that following a brain-healthy lifestyle and performing regular, targeted brain exercises can also increase your brain’s cognitive reserve.
So, as Gerry Hopman says, “Keep learning: computer, languages, skills, crafts, whatever. Never let the brain be idle. An idle mind is the devil’s workshop, and the devil’s name is Alzheimer’s.”
And why shouldn’t we laugh? The way they’re playing with our social security we’re going to have to live longer just to get our money back!
THE FOUR STAGES OF CAREGIVING
Stage One – Getting Started
You may ask: What is a caregiver? What does a caregiver do?
According to the Area Agency on Aging of Pasco-Pinellas, Inc., if you are you providing unpaid assistance to a spouse, relative, or friend who is ill, disabled, or needs help with basic activities of daily living you are a caregiver. If you help with rides to the doctor, shopping, meals, bill paying, bathing, grooming, dressing, walking or transferring to a wheelchair, housekeeping, managing medications, or arranging services to be provided by others, you are a caregiver.
Talk to your immediate family about you being the caregiver. Make sure they understand that you will not be able to spend a lot of time with them and let them be involved in your decision. Then reach out to the extended family.
Stage Two – Finding Help
If you have been a caregiver for months – or longer – on a regular basis, you are the primary caregiver. It has become clear that this is not going to be a short-term illness with a quick recovery. If you also hold a full-time job, caregiving may be exhausting you already. What is your loved one’s prognosis? How many more years of caregiving lie ahead?
Now is the time when you must find relief for you, the caregiver. Clearly, the loved one needs to have continuity of care, but if you do not find support for the person needing care there will soon be two people in need. As the flight attendants instruct, “put your mask on first.” If you don’t take care of your health you will not be able to provide the support your loved one needs. Look to family, friends, faith communities, and caregiving agencies for additional assistance.
Stage Three: Heavy Care
You may have been providing care for years to someone whose mental or physical health is deteriorating – now at a more rapid rate. If the person for whom you are caring has Alzheimer’s disease or another degenerative disease, wandering at night may become a risk. But you cannot work ‘around the clock’. Your first responsibility must be to care for yourself. Caregiver burnout helps no one. Your second responsibility is to protect your care recipient, maintaining a safe and loving environment.
Stage Four: Letting Go
Letting go focuses on the meaningful and positive experiences you shared with your loved one. It also acknowledges the grief that comes with loss of a loved one – whether through death, placement in a nursing home or mental deterioration. In this final stage, you have come to an end of the cycle of caregiving as you have known it. You will be experiencing grief in your loss, both of the care recipient and of your own role as caregiver. Still, your life must go forward as you reconnect with the world around you. No doubt, your caregiving experience will have given you new perspectives as you resume former activities and, quite possibly, pursue new directions as well.
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