DEMENTIA HOME CARE: How to Prepare Before, During, and After by Tracy Cram Perkins – Patient Caregiving, Alzheimer’s Disease, Surviving Loss

Dementia Home Care: How to Prepare Before, During, and After, by Tracy Cram Perkins, offers the lived experience of a caregiver, sharing the experiences that impressed upon her the enormity of the physical, emotional, and psychological task she undertook.

These same experiences made Perkins aware of the dearth of practical resources for the novice embarking on this journey. She hopes to fill that gap with this comprehensive, “user-friendly” guide that goes well beyond the limits of a self-help book, impersonal how-to manual, or clinical tome. From Dementia Home Care, readers will gain new insights into human behavior and how to become an effective caregiver without sacrificing their own well-being.

Perkins’ written voice captivates from the beginning. Her first-person accounts of caring for afflicted loved ones are both relatable and authentic. The reader will find themself laughing aloud, or filled with dread, as the author recounts actual experiences that are otherwise hard to imagine happening to oneself.

Perkins’s book explores issues that can stymie the well-meaning, ill-equipped caregiver.

Unexpected situations and/or inexplicable behaviors tend to push one to react first and reflect later. Dementia Home Care not only reveals the sublimated emotional reactions which can skew a caregiver’s perception–and reactions–but also reaffirms the uniquely human qualities of caregiving that often go untapped and unrecognized.

This amazingly comprehensive book seems to address all questions a reader might have.

It contains sections from the commitment of a caregiver and the realities of hands-on challenges, to what happens when the loved one dies, and everything in between.

Perkins includes chapters dealing with legal nuts and bolts, as well as details that one might not have thought about. From emergency preparedness to closing social media accounts to dealing with social security, creditors, and the tax man. She even discusses one’s own emotional functioning after their caregiver role has ended.

Readable, practical, and informative, Perkins’ book is a valuable tool not only for the “home” caregiver, but for any facilities providing eldercare, and for individuals as they move along their personal paths toward old age.

Dementia Home Care by Tracy Cram Perkins won First Place in the 2022 CIBA I&I Awards for Instruction & Insight Non-Fiction.