Alzheimer’s and
Memory Loss

4 Tips to Ease Caregiver Stress

From our Care Blog

The responsibilities and challenges of caring for a loved one can place significant stress on the family caregiver. In fact, this stress can build up and cause caregiver distress—a situation where the caregiver may become more susceptible to other health risks, including depression, anxiety, sleeplessness, and nagging health problems such as headaches. To help family caregivers combat this potential for caregiver distress, our Ask Nurse Gina has five tips to help reduce Caregiver Stress. Exercise: When schedules get busy, exercise is usually the first thing to go. Make sure the caregiver in your family has time each day for some...

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Alzheimer’s Disease: Caring for the Caregiver

From our Care Blog

June is Alzheimer’s & Brain Awareness Month. Worldwide, 47 million people are living with Alzheimer’s and other dementias and behind every person fighting this disease is a family member and caregiver battling it too. We know you’ve got questions. You’re scared and worried about what is going to happen next. This isn’t healthy. Caregivers and family members living alongside a person with Alzheimer’s need to care for themselves too. It’s not easy but it must be done for you to maintain your own health. We asked our FirstLight Home Care Caregivers to give us their best tools to help maintain...

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Thinking About Senior Care For Your Aging Parents?

From our Care Blog

Maybe your parents should no longer drive or have mobility issues. Maybe your Mom or Dad has dementia and needs constant monitoring. Whatever the case, baby boomers handling care for an elderly relative has become the “new normal.” In fact, more than 43.5 million Americans are caring for someone older than 50, according to the Family Caregiver Alliance. Whereas your parents used to take care of you, you may now find the roles reversed – you are now considering how to take care of them.  How could you not? They loved you and provided for you all those years so now...

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Why Seniors Want to Age in Place

From our Care Blog

If you even mention the words “assisted living” or “nursing home” to your parents, chances are the words make them cringe.  The thought conjures up images of loneliness, being surrounded in an unfamiliar environment with people that are strangers. In fact, most seniors fear moving out of their home more than death. In fact, nearly 90 percent of seniors want to stay in their own homes as they age even if they need day-to-day assistance. In a study conducted by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) only 9% of seniors prefer to move to a facility where health care...

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It Takes a Village

From our Care Blog

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="231"] Molly Rowe – Owner, FirstLight Home Care of Salem, MA[/caption] Guilt, I’m discovering, is a huge part of this aging thing. Our parent feels guilt for putting us out, frets about being a burden, worries about picking up the phone to ask for help. We the adult children question our decisions, second-guess our actions, and feel guilt for all we can’t do. I feel similar guilt with my preschool-aged children—worrying about their school, wondering if I’m reading enough books, stressing because they like only one vegetable. But with young children, it’s ok—even expected—to ask for help....

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Opening The Conversation on Care

From our Care Blog

Molly Rowe owns FirstLight Home Care of Salem, MA with her husband, Steve, and lives in Swampscott with their two sons. A few weeks ago, I wrote about our regrets related to my father-in-law in the last few years of his life. Since then, I’ve heard many stories from people who’ve shared similar experiences caring for an aging parent or loved one. Every story is different of course, but there’s one sentence I keep hearing over and over: “Looking back, we should have had help.” It’s mind-boggling to me, really, that we are all in this “caring for our parent”...

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Living a Purpose-Filled Life At Any Age

From our Care Blog

Molly Rowe owns FirstLight Home Care of Salem, MA with her husband, Steve, and lives in Swampscott with their two sons. [caption id="" align="alignleft" width="137"] Molly Rowe - Owner, FirstLight Home Care of Salem, MA[/caption] Of all the things that baffled us about our dad’s (my dad-in-law’s) behavior in the last few years of his life, there’s one thing that stands out most of all. It wasn’t that he started freezing all his food (including his butter) or sleeping in a chair every night. It was that he stopped doing crossword puzzles. Crossword puzzles were a mainstay in his house...

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Conversations We Wish We’d Had

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Molly Rowe owns FirstLight Home Care of Salem, MA with her husband, Steve, and lives in Swampscott with their two sons. About a year ago last summer, my husband, his siblings, and I sat around our kitchen table having the conversation we’d long avoided—how to care for Dad. Like most people who end up sitting at this table, we had a lot of questions and not a lot of answers. We Googled things like home care and visiting nurses, debated how to take his driver’s license away, and fretted about how we’d bring it up to him. Little did we...

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How To Find The Right Caregiver

From our Care Blog

A caregiver is an important companion for your parent and can support them with everything from bathing and light housekeeping, to meal preparation, prescription pick-ups and transportation to and from doctor’s appointments. If you have determined that having additional outside support to help you care for your parents, you might struggle with where to start to find an outside service and even one you can trust. Following are some important considerations to get the process started. Caregivers can be found through personal referrals, but oftentimes it is easier to go through a reliable referring service that handles the background checks...

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Baby Boomer Trends

From our Care Blog

The Baby Boomer generation are pretty cool. There are 40 million Americans age 65 and older and they make up 13 percent of the population. By 2030, when all the baby boomers will have passed age 65, this group will represent over 20 percent of the population. What’s fascinating is that they continue to make a difference in our world. Here are some trends that show just how Baby Boomers are making an impact! 1. Helping Young People: Baby Boomers are going back to the classroom to support local schools. With funding reduced in area schools, many Boomers are joining...

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