Round-Up: Travel Tips, Dementia Study, Hospice Music and the Perfect Conversation

Some articles, posts, and items of interest from around the web collected from the past couple weeks:

• The Caregiving Solutions blog offers tips about traveling with elders and the disabled. Preplanning is essential to the process and wellness coach Pamela Larsen Schroeder offers some good advice caregivers should think before their trip.


• From the Changing Aging blog - "HealthPartners’ research foundation and the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota are recruiting participants through the summer for a study that will seek better means of stress management for people who are caregivers to a family member with dementia. To learn more or sign up, contact Dana McGree at 952-967-5031 or dana.a.mcgree@healthpartners.com."
  


• The Boston Globe offers a review of a new release of 'hospice music':
  

  The title of classical guitarist Marcia Feldman's new CD, released June 17, is "Between the Worlds." Perhaps no idea could better sum up the unique realm that Feldman's music inhabits. She is a hospice musician - a performer who plays tunes to soothe the dying. The worlds she refers to in the CD's title are those of life and death, and her music is designed specifically to ease the transition from one to the other.
  
  It's an unusual niche, to be sure, but one in which the Dedham resident has long felt comfortable. Trained in classical guitar and jazz vocals at Berklee College of Music, Feldman first began thinking about the connection between death and music when she lost her father 20 years ago. "His situation did not involve hospice care; he died suddenly," she said. "But something about the process of grieving for him made me think increasingly about the role music plays at our most troubling times."



• This blog features posts about two family members diagnosed with cancer, the mother and brother of the writer. This post describes the conversation between the brother and his oncologist.
  

  After discussing Craig’s report, Dr. F. gently began asking Craig questions about his quality of life, including how he feels compared to six weeks ago; if he’s happy with the chemo results thus far; and if he feels satisfied with his quality of life. He asked these calmly, and in a way that shaded his own opinion from that of Craig’s. Craig answered every question, with each response growing labored from sheer exhaustion. He said that he felt more tired than six weeks ago, when he felt he was more on the mend. He seems most distressed about his fatigue, which has prevented him from doing the things he loves, like reading, writing, and playing music. He said he can muster energy to do short activities, but even those are difficult; talking has become another short activity. Still, he feels he’s satisfied with his life (so far) and would like to continue. If I know my brother, he won’t be the one to say stop.
  
  It broke my heart to hear him speak about his life, a life that was so vibrant and so full of promise just six months earlier. That he’s had to discuss his own treatment, and consider his own mortality less than one week after burying Mom seems particularly cruel. But there’s never a good time for such a discussion, and Dr. F. did it perfectly. He ended the discussion by saying that if C were to say that he no longer wanted to continue with the medicine, he would view it as a reasonable statement. He also added that he sees a lot of cancer patients, and that C seems to be fighting hard to be where he is. He noted that he had hoped C would be in a better position symptomatically, and though there’s still a chance he may turn the corner, Sorafenib hasn’t really helped C in terms of enhancing his energy.