My website and Daily Digest or blog has grown legs, and is now being referred to as a resource for a variety of dementia training organisations or other sites. It is exciting and empowering, and also gratifying it is seen as useful, but with this comes a certain amount of pressure to ‘perform’! Some time…
My blog today was to be about what assets I still have, and the things my advocacy and blog are achieving, but after reading Remember the children in the Australian Ageing Agenda , I felt it too important a topic not to add this as my blog for today. It is not just after the…
Some time ago, I wrote ‘dementia is awkward to live with’. The thing that stands out in that phrase for me now is ‘to live with’, as I suspect this is a significant key to remaining positive. When first diagnosed, I was told to “give up work, give up study, and start living for the…
Todays blog is just a picture, to give my global friends who have not yet been to visit Australia an idea of how big it is! We don’t generally ride kangaroos to school or have them running around in the city street, except in our capital city Canberra, where the city is set amongst a…
A couple of years ago, I was talking to a biographer about my early life, and we had a conversation with Mum. It was short, but interesting, and made me realise a few simple things, such as my mother loved me as much as I love my own children and was proud of me even…
My husband talks about how having dementia in our life as it like having a ‘threesome’, and how the three of us simply have to co-exist! He talks about how it is not an ideal situation as most people know two’s company and three is more often than not a crowd. He said earlier this year,…
Recently I have written a lot of blogs about what is means from a personal perspective to lose ones memory or ability to recall, so thought I’d add a simple explanation of memory loss in dementia, from the Alzheimer’s Australia website. “One of the main symptoms of dementia is memory loss. We all forget things…
Maybe that is what my blog has become for me, as I’m still struggling with having not properly published my blog from a week ago! I do seem to gauge, they same way as we checked the rain every day on the farm, how well I am doing. I know my husband and some of…
This is my second blog post today, making up for a day I accidentally missed; I am feeling quite annoyed with myself because I didn’t actually post the blog I wrote for Saturday 18th August! Yes, I know, my mantra is, Did anyone die? And if not, then it isn’t really a problem!!‘ It doesn’t always…
I’ve been reading some Emily Brontë poems lately, and have thought about grieving and dementia in relation to her poem Remembrance. The danger of grieving is that the dead can become more real to you than the living, and you can love them more in death than when they were alive, somehow take more notice of…
The changes brought on by dementia are relentless, yet most people don’t see them as disabilities just as external symptoms. Many also think it is a mental illness, which it is not. The word Dementia is taken from Latin, originally meaning madness; no wonder we struggle against the myths! And so, we are regularly defined…
How our Brains Make Memories, an article by the Smithsonian.com’s Greg Miller, For those of us who cherish our memories and like to think they are an accurate record of our history, the idea that memory is fundamentally malleable is more than a little disturbing. Not all researchers believe Nader has proved that the process of…
Image from http://yougottobekidding.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/image0015.jpg directed to me via a lovely cyberfriend!
With any terminal illness, it is important to make plans for your needs at this stage of your illness, in terms of medical care, end of life issues, legal and financial wishes. Planning for end of life issues would be better done at a much earlier stage of life, when decisions are made without the…
I’m reviewing a method of research called Autoethnography, which I am leaning about and thinking about, and whether my blog is a form of it, in a non-academic sort of way. Wikipedia says Autoethnography is a form of self-reflection and writing that explores the researcher’s personal experience and connects this autobiographical story to wider cultural, political, and…
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