Blog Posts - March 2016

If I Lose My Hearing, Will I Also Lose My Memory?

March 30, 2016 By Flora Davis
I don’t hear as well as I used to. For the past few years, I’ve had to strain to follow the conversation in a crowded room, and I’ve watched television with the help of closed captions for the hearing-impaired. But like the vast majority of other Americans who have some hearing loss, I put off going to an audiologist to find out whether I needed hearing aids. Then I read something that made me think delaying the test might be a mistake.  Read more...

Getting Out Alive (and Staying That Way)

March 25, 2016 By Pepper Evans
My role as caregiver and advocate has me quite familiar with transitioning a patient from hospital back to home sweet home. In my experience, the weak link in the process is almost always with discharge instructions and expectations. Patients leaving facilities are overwhelmed with instructions they (and even their caregivers) can't understand; doctors' orders get lost and misinterpreted; one doctor doesn't know what the other has prescribed, and so on. When patients return home to an unsafe environment, unprepared to cope with new limitations, too often they end up right back in the hospital. It's a problem so pervasive that hospitals are now literally paying the price for readmissions—they're fined by Medicare.  Read more...

I’ll Have What She’s Having—Minus the Internalized Ageism

March 21, 2016 By Ashton Applewhite
“There is also something profoundly liberating about aging,” Dominique Browning wrote in the New York Times. “Only when you hit 60 can you begin to say, with great aplomb, ‘I’m too old for this.’” That’s her new mantra, and the title of her essay, which lingered on the Times’s most emailed list for days. Why? People want stories that ring true to their experience of growing older because they include its welcome aspects.  Read more...

Bill Traylor, People’s Artist

March 11, 2016 By Victoria Robinson
I knew very little about Bill Traylor before I walked into the American Folk Art Museum in New York City to see an exhibition of his work. I knew he was a self-taught artist from the South—but that’s all I knew. When I learned from the gallery text that he didn’t start making art until he was in his mid-80s, I was awestruck. Embarking on anything in one’s 80s is rare. Ending up in a museum is radical.  Read more...

80 and Counting

March 09, 2016 By Flora Davis
I’ve turned 80 and it’s a little scary. I’m healthy and still working, but I’m well aware that medical problems began for many of my friends once they were in their 80s.  Read more...

In Dog Years

March 02, 2016 By Pepper Evans
Have you met my dog, Ruffles? At her annual well-dog visit, my vet referred to her as geriatric. Ruffles is almost a decade young, and sure, she is a little grayer and sometimes doesn't make the leap onto the bed on her first try, but geriatric?  Read more...