The Caregiving Zone


Book Description

" a unique opportunity to learn about caregiving from a true veteran and practitioner of the art."-Jon D. Kaiser, M.D., Physician and Author of Healing HIV Coping with illness and dying is a challenge. How do we allocate resources? What are the rights and responsibilities of the sick and those tending them? Can the burdens of caregiving be blessings in disguise? In The Caregiving Zone, Peggy Flynn, founder and director of The Good Death Institute, describes the everyday challenges of caregiving. She encourages us to think about illness and death as incontrovertible realities that can be anticipated and made less burdensome for everyone involved. "Death is hard, but it doesn't have to be hideous." Using personal stories and reflections, Ms. Flynn illuminates life "in the Zone" with understanding and empathy. She suggests that individuals and families "take charge of the inevitable" by confronting their fears and preparing for illness and death before events overtake them. She envisions "a program designed for families or groups of friends who want to be proactive about the inevitable." The Caregiving Zone illustrates how both giving and receiving care can provide opportunities and rewards in addition to burdens. Sometimes, with insight, information and compassion, the benefits can outweigh the costs.




The Caregiving Zone


Book Description

".a unique opportunity to learn about caregiving from a true veteran and practitioner of the art." -Jon D. Kaiser, M.D., Physician and Author of Healing HIV Coping with illness and dying is a challenge. How do we allocate resources? What are the rights and responsibilities of the sick and those tending them? Can the burdens of caregiving be blessings in disguise? In The Caregiving Zone, Peggy Flynn, founder and director of The Good Death Institute, describes the everyday challenges of caregiving. She encourages us to think about illness and death as incontrovertible realities that can be anticipated and made less burdensome for everyone involved. "Death is hard, but it doesn't have to be hideous." Using personal stories and reflections, Ms. Flynn illuminates life "in the Zone" with understanding and empathy. She suggests that individuals and families "take charge of the inevitable" by confronting their fears and preparing for illness and death before events overtake them. She envisions "a program designed for families or groups of friends who want to be proactive about the inevitable." The Caregiving Zone illustrates how both giving and receiving care can provide opportunities and rewards in addition to burdens. Sometimes, with insight, information and compassion, the benefits can outweigh the costs.




The Caregiver Zone


Book Description




Caring for the Caregiver


Book Description

Care giving professionals are notoriously poor at looking after themselves; they give part of themselves everyday, see people at their lowest and most vulnerable. As well as being exposed to the physical trauma, they deal with acute psychological distress on a daily basis; their own and of others. Learning to still follow your dreams and have personal goals, many just put their life on a back burner and let others take over. This is a dangerous trait, as it leads to unhappiness, stress, discontentment and burnout. Many great people are leaving all areas of caring, because they feel they are running on empty. Giving excuses and blame for this to others, will not change anything. Take charge of your life, your choices and your outcomes. This to a carer will sound selfish, but in reality; what is going to happen to your patients when you are absent minded, make mistakes, get upset or angry, when you burnout and are no longer able to care for yourself, or them. Looking after yourself is not a luxury - it is a necessity, being resilient, knowing your boundaries and learning to say no, are fundamental for your wellbeing and for your patients. Learn how to off load self sabotaging thoughts, beliefs and habits. Choose what internal and external baggage you carry with you. Dump outdated thoughts, replace them with a more positive, protective and proactive outlook, to achieve better outcomes. Caring for the wellbeing of others is a fundamental part of you, but learning to care about yourself seems to take a lot of work. Seeing your needs, wants and desires as equal to everyone else, is a must. By keep giving small pieces of yourself to everyone else, when do you have time, energy or inclination to give to yourself? Compassion Fatigue is not acknowledge in the Northern Hemisphere, but the feeling of running on empty is undoubtedly known to all professions, volunteers and home carers. It is a silent killer, a demon that will take you emotionally, psychologically and physically to exhaustion. There are ways for you to feel better, to learn to love yourself and to live the life you desire and deserve, as well as giving to others. You have to take control and get rid of outdated thoughts, beliefs and habits. To be not just the best professional you can be, but the best person for you and for others.




Recognizing Rural Ministry


Book Description

Rural ministry can be a frustrating endeavor. Traditional metrics of success are misleading and anecdotal, one-size-fits-all approaches which often fall flat in the field. In Recognizing Rural Ministry, Carl Greene uses his research to suggest tools to customize your ministry to your community and effectively engage often-overlooked mission fields. These tools come from data-driven academic research presented through the lens of the author's lived experience as a dairy farmer, rural pastor, hospice chaplain, rural layperson, rural policy advocate, and administrator of a network of churches. The book is intended for rural ministry practitioners who want to use current scholarship to better examine the complexity and diversity of rural contexts. The book engages with the rural ministry impact of cultural phenomena such as the rise of the "Spiritual but Not Religious" (SBNR) phenomenon and "early old age" (EOA) demographics. The text also addresses key theories surrounding rural subcultures, demographic tools available to describe rural communities, and the shaping influence of rural community rituals on religiosity. Intended for pastors, seminarians, college students, and rural laypersons who are passionate about adding to their toolbox of rural ministry assessment.




The Gray Zone


Book Description




The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving


Book Description

In The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (releasing June 24, 2016 as a Netflix Original Film titled The Fundamentals of Caring, starring Paul Rudd and Selena Gomez), Jonathan Evison, author of the new novel This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! and the New York Times bestseller West of Here, has crafted a novel of the heart, a story of unlikely heroes in a grand American landscape. For Ben Benjamin, all has been lost--his wife, his family, his home, his livelihood. Hoping to find a new direction, he enrolls in a night class called The Fundamentals of Caregiving, where he will learn to take care of people with disabilities. He is instructed about professionalism, about how to keep an emotional distance between client and provider, and about the art of inserting catheters while avoiding liability. But when Ben is assigned his first client--a tyrannical nineteen-year-old boy named Trevor, who is in the advanced stages of Duchenne muscular dystrophy--he soon discovers that the endless service checklists have done nothing to prepare him for the reality of caring for a fiercely stubborn, sexually frustrated teenager who has an ax to grind with the whole world. Over time, the relationship between Ben and Trev, which had begun with mutual misgivings, evolves into a close friendship, and the traditional boundaries between patient and caregiver begin to blur. The bond between them strengthens as they embark on a road trip to visit Trev’s ailing father--a journey rerouted by a series of bizarre roadside attractions that propel them into an impulsive adventure disrupted by one birth, two arrests, a freakish dust storm, and a six-hundred-mile cat-and-mouse pursuit by a mysterious brown Buick Skylark. By the end of that journey, Trev has had his first taste of love, and Ben has found a new reason to love life. Bursting with energy and filled with moments of absolute beauty, this big-hearted and inspired novel ponders life’s terrible surprises as well as what it takes to truly care for another human being.




Share the Care


Book Description

Whether you're prepared for it or not, chances are you'll take on the role of caregiver when a family member or friend is affected by a serious illness. As you'll soon discover, the tasks will range from major ones, checking someone into the hospital, sorting out insurance coverage, keeping track of medications - to the minor: walking the dog, preparing a meal, or just being there for someone. If you're determined to help but you're feeling overwhelmed by the responsibilities, Share The Care offers a sensible and loving solution: a unique ground approach that can turn a circle of ordinary people into a powerful caregiver team. Here are valuable guidelines, compassionate suggestions, and a simple-to-use workbooks section that together offer support to help free the patient from worry and the caregivers from burnout. Share The Care offers friends and family the best answer ever to the frequently asked question "What can I do?"







Care for the Caregiver


Book Description

Dr. Sherry Blake, a prominent, licensed clinical psychologist who serves a clientele that includes some of America's top professionals and entertainers, discovers through a series of subtle and harrowing incidents that her mother and father are no longer able to live independently. Her mother suffers from an unexpected onset of Alzheimer's, while her father battles dementia. Dr. Sherry, as she is better known, compares her caregiving experience to that of an emotional roller coaster ride with gravity-defying twists and turns, uphill climbs and downhill slides that leave her terrified and off-balance. She enlists all of her resources, skills and talents to step up to the challenge of meeting the many needs of her parents and their care. As the ride reaches maximum velocity, Dr. Sherry finds herself in a head-on crash with a pair of willful parents, especially her mother, and a set of siblings stuck in what she calls the "denial zone." Over the course of 10 years, Dr. Sherry executes a series of solutions for her parents' care--from an extended stay at an assisted living home, to placement at a residential care home when they become too frail, to a final return home to live out their last days. Dr. Sherry's goal in "Care for the Caregiver" is to provide useful and needed information that will reduce emotional stress and provide readers with critical tools for their respective journeys. After analyzing her own journey and the experiences of many other caregivers, she concluded that there are three distinct "Rs" or phases in caregiving: Recognition--Pre-Caregiving; Reality--Caregiving; and Release--Post-Caregiving, with specific aspects of each phase, including: recognizing, adjusting to and understanding the physical and/or emotional changes of your loved ones; identifying and providing what is needed at any given time; and coping with and accepting the ongoing multiple changes without losing control emotionally, while preparing to let them go. While readers may not be able to get out of their caregiver coasters, "Care for the Caregiver" will definitely make the ride less frightening and stressful and a great deal more manageable.