Living Well After an Alzheimer's Diagnosis: new ebook

It’s easy to say you can live well with memory loss, but what exactly does that involve?  How do you arrange your life when you or a family member has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or dementia?  Where do you start?

A new and affordable ($1.99) ebook, Living Well After an Alzheimer's Diagnosis, is full of practical ideas and tips for everyone in the family.  The four chapter ebook is written by Lisa Gwyther and  P. Murali Doraiswamy, a social worker and a physician,  and was previously published as part of The Alzheimer’s Action Plan.

Living Well After an Alzheimer’s Diagnosis deals less with the technical details and more with the practical business of living with cognitive challenges.   Somehow this slimmed-down version makes it easier to appreciate the graceful and gracious ideas in this book. 

Based on their experience working with thousands of families in the Duke Family Support Program, the authors suggest kind and often humorous ways to deal with situations.  For instance, if you’re frustrated trying to learn how to use the new coffeepot or microwave your family has given you to make life “easier,” go back to using the old one, they advise.  Give the new one away, and if your family asks about it, blame it on Alzheimer’s!  The point is to spend less time on frustrating activities, and more time doing rewarding, pleasurable things.

For the person with early stage dementia, the book is full of ideas, including how to:

• manage your relationship with your doctor to get the best care
• tell if treatments are working
•  stay “you” after a diagnosis
• talk with friends and family about how they can help you
• deal with some of the lesser known symptoms of dementia
• arrange your home and your schedule to minimize problems.

There’s also an entire chapter on “the middle years,” and how caregivers can deal with specific situations as a family member’s cognitive challenges increase.  The authors suggest tactful ways to deal with issues like changing relationships, difficult behavior and bathing.  For example, it’s natural to get angry and issue denials when a spouse with dementia falsely accuses you of something in front of friends.  Instead, try to distract your spouse, the authors say, and consider saying something like “I’ll agree to believe only half of what I hear about you if you do the same for me.”

Living Well After an Alzheimer’s Diagnosis takes some of the fear out of a diagnosis, and offers guidelines for enjoying life no matter your cognitive status.

Note:  you don’t need a Kindle reader to get this ebook.  You can download Kindle for PC or Kindle for Mac to your computer for free, and then download  ebooks to your computer.