Alzheimer’s and
Memory Loss

Health: Foot Care and the Right Pair of Shoes

From our Care Blog

Be kind to your feet. As we age, the years of wear and tear can be hard on them. Disease, bad circulation, poorly trimmed toenails, and wearing shoes that don't fit can also harm your feet. Nurse Gina has discussed many times within the FirstLight Home Care family that foot problems are sometimes the first sign of more serious medical conditions such as arthritis, diabetes, and nerve or circulatory disorders. Her recommendations.... practice good foot care. The National Institute on Aging recommends that you look at your feet often; use a mirror to look at the bottoms of your feet....

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Family Discussion: Long Distance Caregiving

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Caregiving from a distance is no easy task. It can be stressful because you can’t be there at a moment’s notice when your parents need you.  To help reduce some of the stress and to help you organize the process for care when your loved ones do not live near you, we have put together some helpful tips we’ve gathered from Nurse Gina. Create a Contact List: Assemble and organize a contact list that includes addresses, phone numbers and emails of friends, neighbors, doctors, faith leaders and others in regular contact with your parents who you can be reached in...

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Restore Your Joy With These Caregiver Stress Relief Tips

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Find yourself overwhelmed with your caregiving duties? Try these caregiver stress relief tips from FirstLight Home Care.

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Thinking About Senior Care For Your Aging Parents?

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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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It Takes a Village

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Molly Rowe – Owner, FirstLight Home Care of Salem, MA 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. You hire a babysitter...

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Opening The Conversation on Care

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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. 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

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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. Molly Rowe - Owner, FirstLight Home Care of Salem, MA 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 after his wife died...

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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

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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

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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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