Monday, November 10, 2014

Parkinson’s National Family Caregivers Month

Do you know a family living with Parkinson's Disease?
 
November is highlighted to build awareness of people with Parkinson’s, both those who endure the disease and those who care for them. This is the month to visibly support family and friends who rally around a loved one with PD. This group includes partners who help with medical appointments or personal care such as dressing or bathing. It also includes those in our extended networks — family, neighbors, co-workers, health professionals — who provide support, making them part of the caregiving network.

It’s important to take time out to talk about their contributions and give them your support.

Parkinson's Disease Foundation in their latest newsletter tells the story of Dr. Maria De Leon who has a unique perspective on caring in Parkinson's disease. In fact, she first cared for her grandmother with Parkinson's disease, then for her patients as a movement disorders neurologist, and now lives with Parkinson's disease herself.
 
The family of Greg Hardoby from Rahway, NJ, have all pitched in since his diagnosis with Parkinson's disease. Mr. Hardoby is himself no stranger to supporting a loved one with PD -- his late grandmother lived with Parkinson's disease. Recently, when he wanted to make a difference by fundraising for PDF, his wife Maria, and their children all helped to put together a golf outing they called Putt Fore Parkinson's and raised more than $5,000. 
 
The family was featured in the NJ Suburban News on September 18, 2014.
 
"Hardoby, who lives with Parkinson's, his wife Maria and their children Ann Marie and Alex, organized the event as part of the PDF Champions program, the grassroots fundraising arm of the Parkinson's Disease Foundation. The golf outing featured several contests such as longest drive and closest to the pin, as well as a pig roast and awards banquet in the evening. The family hopes to make the golf outing an annual event."
 

Few of us have the time or energy to organize such an event, but this month simply make a phone call to your PD friends, take a caregiver out for a latte, send an email, add this link to your Facebook page as tribute to your friends, smile encouragement in the grocery store to a stranger walking with a cane and a caregiver. So simple. So appreciated.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

DO YOU KNOW HOW IGNORANCE CAN REGULATE A CULTURE?


At Home. A short history of private life.  by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian vicarage in England and one day he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as found in that comfortable home. To remedy this, he formed the idea of journeying about his house from room to room to “write a history of the world without leaving home.” The bathroom provides the occasion for the history of hygiene, the bedroom for an account of sex, death, and sleep, the kitchen for a discussion of nutrition and the spice trade, and so on, showing how each has figured in the evolution of private life. From architecture to electricity, from food preservation to epidemics, from crinolines to the cotton gin—and the brilliant, creative and often eccentric talents behind them—Bryson demonstrates that whatever happens in the world ends up in our houses.

For example, in 1983 a vine owner observed leaves “covered with galls from which sprang insects of a kind he had not seen before.” He was the “first in Europe to suffer from an infestation of grape phylloxera, a tiny aphid, that would shortly devastate the European wine industry.”  The result in France in 1952 was wine growers in southern France finding their vines dying. “Because the insects infested the roots, the first sign of mortal illness was the first sign of anything. Farmers couldn’t dig up the roots to see if aphids were present without killing the vines, so they just had to wait and hope. Forty percent of France’s vines were killed in fifteen years. Eighty percent were ‘reconstituted’ through the grafting on of American roots.”  “It is thanks to American roots that French wines still exist.”

And here is an example of the delightful melding of historical facts by Mr. Bryson: “Phylloxera aphids from the New World had almost certainly reached Europe before, but would have arrived as little corpses, unable to survive the long sea voyage. The introduction of fast steamships at sea and even faster trains on land meant that the little pests could arrive refreshed and ready to conquer new territory.”

To further quote the back cover of my large print library copy:  Bryson’s wit and sheer prose fluency make At Home one of the most entertaining books about private life ever written.