My passion is to help people plan for long term health care needs. This includes helping families with crisis management that requires long term health care. The goal is to assist these individual’s to remain independent and in their homes or a familiar surrounding for as long as possible.

My commitment to enhance the lives of aging adults comes not only from clinical experience, but from personal experience while caring for my father and mother in law.

I was a very young woman, when I saw the mental and emotional decline that occurred in my grandmother when my father and his brothers decided it was time to place her in a nursing home. I vowed to do everything in my power to assist my aging loved ones to stay at home as they aged.

My father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the age of 72. When he was told that hospice was his only option, he was devastated. My father was man of modest means, but he had a timeshare in Hawaii. He saved and planned his vacation there every other year. This was the year he was to go to Hawaii. His first thoughts were that he would have to cancel his trip.

I asked my father to wait and see how he was feeling before he cancelled his trip. I explained the role of hospice was not so much about dying, as it was about how you chose to live your life before you die.

A few weeks later, my father spent 6 weeks in Hawaii on hospice. His mental, emotional and physical health improved so much the first week that the nurses felt that he did not require their services. My dad started feeling sick they say, just before he was to return home to the mainland. He died at home several weeks later surrounded by his family and friends. I believe he lasted as long as he did because he was mentally, spiritually and emotionally uplifted by his ability live out his dream of taking his last trip.

I have a passion for helping aging adults realize their goal of remaining at home as they age. I have a strong belief that aging adults do better, live longer and healthier lives surrounded by their loved ones and familiar surroundings.