Dementia Resilience with Jill Lorentz

Finding a good community to care for your loved one is anything but easy. Today I will walk you through all of the challenging decisions, and help you look for the best place to fit your person’s needs. How do you work with the staff? What will the separation be like? Are you breaking a promise? Let me help!

The show this week is about the ever changing scope of love, loss, intimacy that is waning, and the loss of meaningful conversation as dementia progresses. For some, keeping the love alive is easier than it is for others. This is a deep conversation on the ever changing world of cognitive and memory loss and how it affects our relationships, especially for spouses.

There are days when we feel like the universe is actively working against us. We cannot get help from professionals, families, and the disease itself is a bit of a nightmare. How do we manage when it all feels overwhelming? This is very real for so many of you and I understand. Let’s chat about this and have a real conversation!

June 8, 2021 – How do we keep our emotions from exploding when the person we are caring for, who has a dementia of some type, has a delusion that you are stealing from them, judging them. It feels mean, personal and quite confusing and annoying. This show will navigate how to change, the paradigm and get to a place of being supportive and kind, learning to act and not react.

June 1, 2021, When working with a person with memory loss and cognitive impairment, they often exhibit a phenomenon of moving back in time, acting out days and times of old, as these are the only memories that are still functioning. They will remember jobs they had in their 20’s, when they had children, childhood thoughts of the home they grew up in. We cannot communicate with them if we are not meeting them where they are. We need to accept that we may be looking at someone in the 60’s, 70’s or 80’s, who believe they are in their 30’s, 20’s or elementary school age. This show will help you figure out what their language is telling you if you are willing to listen and go there. It can be a wonderful walk down memory lane and will open lines of communication you never imagined was possible.

May 25, 2021 – I am feeling relieved that masks are going away and things feel back to normal a bit. Why? The pandemic just added on to what we were already struggling with like mood changes, achy joints, anxious people, confusion and sometimes despair. We don’t realize how disruptive days of rain or snow can be. It can be hard to stay above the fray when emotions jump around and once someone is feeling blue or depressed, it can be crazy hard to get them out of it. What do we do? Well, I have some ideas for you!

May 18, 2021 – Dementia issues can become severe when someone is up at night on and off. This is when falls can occur, scary visits to the mirror cause screams, everyone wakes up tired and cranky. What do we do? I am taking a fresh look at ways to address these issues and give you some techniques to try that you may not have thought of. Grab a pad and pen and something to drink, snuggle in and get some help for yourself. When your person experiencing dementia doesn’t sleep, no one gets any rest. This show is dedicated to helping to ease this problem!

May 11, 2021 – Today my show is about the tough part of transitioning your loved one from your care to the memory unit that will eventually care for them. It is painful to say the least and scary as well. Do we feel like we let them down? Did we break a promise? Did the scope of care become more than we can handle? The answer to all of this is most likely YES. Covid restrictions has made all of this twice as hard as it normally would be. How do we make this move? How long will it take to get used to? I can tell you that most often it is harder for the person who placed their loved one, than it is on the person experiencing dementia of some type. This is hard conversation that will help.

May 4, 2021 Today my show is all about helping the care partner’s and my #caregivernation with finding ways to ease your stress. What do we do to rid ourselves of anxiety, anger, and depression? How do we ask for help? Are you a martyr, thinking you must do it all so you can pat yourself on the back all the way to the funny farm for caregivers? How’s that working for you? I have many ideas to help with a myriad of issues, and solutions to get you through this journey. Let’s talk my friends!