Tag: dementia

The Mustache

This short story follows a teenager straddling the precarious line between adolescence and adulthood, Mike, as he visits his grandmother in an assisted living facility. He discovers that she thinks he is her late husband when she tries desperately to get him to forgive her for a past wrong, while Mike is bewildered at such a raw view of someone he previously only thought of as a distant relation, not her own person. This would be useful for a class discussion on dementia and its effects on family members, as well as the residential care industry itself. It might be a particularly important resource for training healthcare workers to work with the elderly in these kinds of facilities to better understand nuanced experiences of both those who live there and those who visit. Courses on aging more generally could also easily incorporate this as a prompt for discussion or writing reflections.

Graphic perspectives on caring, aging and end-of-life

In this article, a writer and English professor reviews various graphic narrative depictions of aging including Joyce Farmer’s Special Exits, Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?, and most prominently Nigel Baines’ Afloat: A Memoir about Mum, Dementia, and Trying Not to Drown. Venema summarizes each of these books’ plotlines and connections to their authors own lives, specifically as retellings of their parents’ experiences. She also explores the benefits of using comics and graphic narratives to tell end-of-life stories in complex, unconventional, temporally warped, and often nonlinear formats. Each of these books could be used as resources in class syllabi on aging, healthcare systems, and care from family and friend support systems, but this comprehensive review could be a useful introductory material for a graphic medicine course.

“A lifespan the length of a dog’s”: Illness as loss in the novel So Much for That

“The clinic and the person” is a podcast series that follows Russell Teagarden’s blog “According to the Arts,” in which he juxtaposes clinical descriptions of illness and disability with literary texts about characters who live with those conditions. In the podcast, he and another medical professional discuss the condition that is the focus of each episode based on their medical experience, and react to the literary text as attentive, sensitive readers. This episode based on the novel, So Much for That, brings discussion of various ways catastrophic illness puts an end to a family’s plans: economically, physically, socially. The website describes the goal of the series as: “developed to summon or quicken the attention of health care professionals, their educators, researchers and others to the interests and plights of people with specific health problems aided through knowledge and perspectives the humanities provide. … The Clinic represents all that Biomedicine brings to bear on disease processes and treatment protocols, and The Person, represents all that people experience from health problems. Our episodes draw from works in the humanities–any genres that relate directly to how people are affected by specific clinical events such as migraine headaches, epileptic seizures, and dementia, and by specific health care situations such as restricted access to care and gut-wrenching, life and death choices. We analyze and interpret featured works and provide thoughts on how they apply in patient care and support; health professions education; clinical and population research; health care policy; and social and cultural influences and reactions.”

Fae Kayarian: Physician in Training, Poet in Progress

Fae Kayarian is a poet and medical student who began as a scribe at Harvard Medical School. She has shared her experiences through poetry in the form of an autobiography titled “Journals of a Visitor” and several stand-alone poems. Her website contains eight poems ranging in topics in medicine from her point of view as a bystander and now a student.

Generally useful for close reading of poetry. Two poems – “The Color Blue” and “It’s been six years” could interest families of patients experiencing loss and dementia. Others would be beneficial for teaching physicians and other health professionals in mentor positions. Her poetry would serve as a reminder of what it’s like to be a student and the impact that medical educators have on the future of medicine as mentors.