The Sudden Caregiver

Are you a sudden caregiver? When an unforeseen medical crisis robs someone you love of their health and wellbeing, do you feel caught off guard and ill-prepared for your role as caregiver? Plenty of research confirms what you may already know: caregiving is depleting, worrying, and exhausting, often leading to physical and emotional burnout, fear, and illness for the caregiver.Yet a growing body of evidence drawn from the field of positive psychology makes it clear that, while caregiving is depleting, it can also be a source of strength, well-being, meaning and purpose. And when caregivers reduce their own stress and increase their own well-being, they do a better job of improving the quality of life for the loved one in their care.Caregiving may be inevitable, but caregiver distress is not. You are not alone. Written by a family caregiver for family caregivers, The Sudden Caregiver, provides a roadmap for your unique caregiving journey helping you to:?Take control of the practical tasks and available resources your circumstances require.?Minimize unpleasant surprises and maximize well-being for you and your loved one.?Leverage "resilience builders" to protect yourself against stress and replenish your spirit. Karen Warner became a sudden caregiver when her late husband, Joel Kurtzman, was diagnosed out of the blue with stage IV cancer. In this book, she enters the complicated world of the informal, unpaid, sudden caregiver, offering guidance, resilience, and, yes, a playbook -- a rational approach for planning what is, essentially, unplannable. Here you will find a roadmap along with six pathways to well-being, designed to help you navigate your caregiving journey with grace and grit. Karen is an executive coach and President of Tangible Group, a coaching and consulting firm that focuses on leadership development and caregiver well-being. She received her Master's degree in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania.For more information, and to receive updates on the publication of The Sudden Caregiver, visit www.thesuddencaregiver.com.

"From a gifted writer who spent two years in a support group for people caring for elderly and ill spouses, parents, and friends, The Caregivers chronicles the daily experiences--heart-breaking, poignant, and redemptive--of ordinary Americans as they face their final life passages"--

Caregiver Therapy shows you how to take care of yourself as you take care of someone else. It invites you to deepen and enrich your caregiving experience—opening your heart to others and opening your spirit to lessons of love and trust.

From the critically acclaimed author of This Burns My Heart comes a “luminous mother-daughter saga” (Entertainment Weekly) about a young woman who is forced to flee 1980s Brazil for California, and in doing so unearths the hidden life of her enigmatic mother. Mara Alencar’s mother Ana is her moon, her sun, her stars. Ana, a struggling voice-over actress, is an admirably brave and recklessly impulsive woman who does everything in her power to care for her little girl in perilous 1980s Rio de Janeiro. With no other family or friends her own age, Ana eclipses Mara’s entire world. They take turns caring for each other—in ways big and small. But who is Ana, really? As she grows older, Mara slowly begins to piece together the many facets of Ana’s complicated life—a mother, a rebel, and always, an actress. When Ana becomes involved with a civilian rebel group attempting to undermine the city’s cruel Police Chief, their fragile arrangement begins to unravel. Mara is forced to flee the only home she’s ever known, for California, where she lives as an undocumented immigrant, caregiving for a dying woman. It’s here that she begins to grapple with her turbulent past and starts to uncover vital truths—about her mother, herself, and what it means to truly take care of someone. A “lovely and heartbreaking” (People) story that is “simultaneously dreamlike and visceral” (The Atlantic), The Caregiver is “a beautiful testament to Samuel Park’s extraordinary talents as a storyteller…that reads, in some moments, like a thriller—and, in others, like a meditation on what it means to be alive…A ferocious page-turner with deep wells of compassion for the struggles of the living—and the sins of the dead” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

Stroke made him a different man and his bride responsible as his depression turned suicidal, complicated by addiction. Personality change--inverted relationship dynamics--post-traumatic stress; with help, she discovered the difference between care giving and enabling, between sacrifice and martyrdom.

This book is aimed at GroupWise System Administrators and those who are in the process of become an Administrator. The book covers the GroupWise basics such as the architecture, design and management of a GroupWise system and also offers information on preventive maintenance and troubleshooting. For experienced administrators this book offers a complete overview of what's new in GroupWise version 8. The author has over 15 years of experience in working with GroupWise systems and therefor is able to offer valuable tips that will be useful for day to day operations and in troubleshooting problems. In addition, the book provides an overview of Teaming + Conferencing, and its integration into GroupWise.

Family caregiving affects millions of Americans every day, in all walks of life. At least 17.7 million individuals in the United States are caregivers of an older adult with a health or functional limitation. The nation's family caregivers provide the lion's share of long-term care for our older adult population. They are also central to older adults' access to and receipt of health care and community-based social services. Yet the need to recognize and support caregivers is among the least appreciated challenges facing the aging U.S. population. Families Caring for an Aging America examines the prevalence and nature of family caregiving of older adults and the available evidence on the effectiveness of programs, supports, and other interventions designed to support family caregivers. This report also assesses and recommends policies to address the needs of family caregivers and to minimize the barriers that they encounter in trying to meet the needs of older adults.

The story of one woman’s struggle to care for her seriously ill husband—and a revealing look at the role unpaid family caregivers play in a society that fails to provide them with structural support. Already Toast shows how all-consuming caregiving can be, how difficult it is to find support, and how the social and literary narratives that have long locked women into providing emotional labor also keep them in unpaid caregiving roles. When Kate Washington and her husband, Brad, learned that he had cancer, they were a young couple: professionals with ascending careers, parents to two small children. Brad’s diagnosis stripped those identities away: he became a patient and she his caregiver. Brad’s cancer quickly turned aggressive, necessitating a stem-cell transplant that triggered a massive infection, robbing him of his eyesight and nearly of his life. Kate acted as his full-time aide to keep him alive, coordinating his treatments, making doctors’ appointments, calling insurance companies, filling dozens of prescriptions, cleaning commodes, administering IV drugs. She became so burned out that, when she took an online quiz on caregiver self-care, her result cheerily declared: “You’re already toast!” Through it all, she felt profoundly alone, but, as she later learned, she was in fact one of millions: an invisible army of family caregivers working every day in America, their unpaid labor keeping our troubled healthcare system afloat. Because our culture both romanticizes and erases the realities of care work, few caregivers have shared their stories publicly. As the baby-boom generation ages, the number of family caregivers will continue to grow. Readable, relatable, timely, and often raw, Already Toast—with its clear call for paying and supporting family caregivers—is a crucial intervention in that conversation, bringing together personal experience with deep research to give voice to those tasked with the overlooked, vital work of caring for the seriously ill.