Recommended Reads: Guidebook offers practical advice for home care of those with dementia

Dementia Home Care, by Tracy Cram Perkins

This book is going to help a lot of people care for people who are dear to them. Here is a comprehensive guide from a caregiver who has lived the experience and accumulated tremendous advice for caring for someone with dementia. Just as valuable is her advice to help you home caretakers too. You need to find out how to help take care of yourself when your world has changed. From the time dementia is diagnosed, your loved one and you are on a journey, a unique one. This is the guidebook with the help you’re looking for, showing where you’re headed and so many helpful tips for preserving your humor, stamina, and emotional connections along the way.

Dementia Home Care is well organized for reading from beginning to end, and it’s also a handy reference where you can quickly access information as you need it on specific topics. As you see the breadth of the subjects, you’ll be impressed. They include recogizing the first symptoms and coping with the following stages, preparing the living environment, personal care, important recipes, long-term care and the end of the journey. Advice is clever, creative, innovative and outlined in a practical way. So many tips and chapters cover information you may not even realize can lessen your load.

The author shares from her personal experience, and her writing also includes notes of citations from formal professionals, reflecting her impressive research. The chapters show you what can be helpful for you, and there’s an extensive appendix of resources from A to Z and how to access those when you need to. This book offers the life hacks of home care to ease the your daily to-do’s. It’s amazing to find out that raising your awareness to situations can lead to doable solutions that can make life easier both for the caregiver and the one they care for. And it’s very important to always remember a good laugh a day soothes tension away — humor laces the text of this important resource book.

— By Wendy Kendall

Wendy Kendall is an author with The Wild Rose Press. Her mystery “Kat Out of the Bag” is available and also the prequel “Purse-Stachio Makes A Splash.” She is a volunteer at the Friends of the Edmonds Library

 

 

 

  1. I am so grateful for Wendy Kendall’s review of this book–having cared for my mother in her dementia, and had excellent backup but saw so many who had no clue, I am overjoyed that this book is available–and hope it makes it into Edmonds Library!

  2. Good on Wendy for bringing this book to our attention. I probably won’t read it because I have lived too much of it and I prefer to think about other things. As I found out when my late wife came down with Lewy Body type dementia, they are just begging to understand and be able to treat the various versions of the diseases. I’ve had primary responsibility for two people and secondary for one and it is essential you know what type of dementia you are dealing with.

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