Articles Posted in Health and Wellness

There are some life experiences that you just can’t understand until you have lived them yourself. For example nothing can truly prepare you for becoming a parent.

Read all the books you want and watch all your friends have their own kids—you will never really get it until you’re the one doing the 2 a.m. feeding or calling the pediatrician about how, exactly, one might safely extract a Lego from a child’s right nostril.

A similar you-can’t-understand-until-you’ve-been-there rule applies to the often poignant transition from being your parent’s child to being their caregiver.

After a loss, family is often tasked with the responsibility of handling the financial and legal matters associated with administering the estate of the deceased.  While this in and of itself can be stressful and overwhelming, perhaps the more emotionally-draining ritual is sorting through personal belongings such as clothing, jewelry, and photos of a loved one.

One often overlooked personal item that must be removed when cleaning out after someone has died, are unused prescriptions and over-the-counter (OTC) medications.

What do you do with these now unneeded, but potentially dangerous, medications when your loved one is gone? How do you make sure they are safely disposed of and do not fall into the wrong hands?

Landing a new job is a daunting task when you’re in your 50s or 60s. The prospect of transitioning to a new company or perhaps rejoining the workforce after some time away can feel like having to reinvent yourself from the ground up.

It doesn’t help that, despite the passage of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) in 1967, ageism is still very much a part of our professional landscape.

Workplace discrimination against someone on the basis of age can take many forms from being passed over for assignments and promotions to being excluded from key meetings to being denied training experiences. And—yes—it can also show up in the hiring process.

Can you hear me now?

It’s an unkind stereotype—the aging person who is constantly saying, “Eh?” because they can’t hear what someone else is saying. While it might make for a funny bit on a TV show or in a movie, in real life, hearing loss is no joking matter. And of course, it’s not only older people who experience hearing loss, it can happen at any age.

Impaired hearing is not only inconvenient and a detriment to quality of life, it can also contribute to physical injury (the inner ear is critical to maintaining balance and avoiding falls) and depression (withdrawal from social situations due to embarrassment can lead to isolation).

Some people joke about hoarders, but those people haven’t lived with the pain, frustration, and very real physical dangers caused by this mental illness.

While hoarding usually presents when a person is still a child, it is a disorder that—like dementia—becomes more prevalent and severe with age. It is an illness that is very difficult to treat, and one that affects not only the hoarder, but everyone around them.

Sadly, like many other mental illnesses, hoarding is often very misunderstood and even maligned. People wrongly assume that hoarding is simply a matter of someone collecting too many things or being too lazy to keep their home tidy.