Living with Rheumatoid Arthritis
Author: Tammi L Shlotzhauer
A trusted guide and an invaluable resource, Living with Rheumatoid Arthritis offers practical advice for the millions of people coping with this painful disease. Now thoroughly revised and expanded, in a second edition, this book brings readers up to date with the latest methods of diagnosis and treatment.
Building on their accessible explanation of the disease and its causes, the authors describe the essential components of care: medication, joint protection, physical activity, and good nutrition. They provide a wealth of new information on medications, including biologic response--modifiers, alternative and complementary approaches, and treatments for osteoporosis (which often accompanies rheumatoid arthritis), and they describe safe and effective ways to cope with pain, stiffness, and fatigue. The book helps readers understand their own emotional responses, as well as those of family and friends, and, because the disease often entails lifestyle changes, it provides practical advice for achieving as normal a life as possible.
With the latest information on medication, nutrition, and resources (online and off), this volume is a complete and comprehensive guide to the management of a difficult disease.
Doody Review Services
Reviewer: Ami N Mody, MD (Washington University Medical Center)
Description: This is a detailed guide for patients and families with rheumatoid arthritis describing, in simple language, what it is, its various manifestations, and what therapeutic interventions are available to treat them. The book is unique in its systematic and in-depth approach to every question. The first edition was published in 1993 and much has changed since then, especially in the field of therapeutic options, making this update quite necessary.
Purpose: The purpose, according to the authors, is to formulate a well-written, readable, comprehensive guide for patients who have rheumatoid arthritis, and for those who care about them and for them. One of the most important needs of persons living with rheumatoid arthritis is education. Informed patients and family members will be better able to deal with the disease and achieve better outcomes if they are educated about the disease, its potential complications, and its treatment. These are worthy objectives and this type of book is really needed.
Audience: According to the author, the book is written for patients with rheumatoid arthritis and for those who care for them or care about them, an appropriate audience. The authors are credible authorities.
Features: The book covers in a systematic fashion and in some detail various rheumatoid arthritis signs and symptoms and therapeutic options to treat them and includes such information as exercises that can be done at home, radiographic changes in the joints, etc. The best aspect of the book is that the language is straightforward, but the complexity of the disease is not downplayed. Excellent illustrations explain various exercises. Tables are used with great effect to convey information. It is interesting to note that questions such as the role of vitamins, spas, etc., that are frequently posed by patients but are generally not a part of routine rheumatology textbooks are included here.
Assessment: Rheumatoid arthritis is a complex disease that requires constant vigilance and significant compliance on the part of the patient and caregiver for optimal response to various therapeutic interventions. This book could prove to be invaluable in the care of the rheumatoid arthritis patients by providing a bridge between the available information and its application.
Booknews
A Johns Hopkins Health Book likely to join their incontinence monograph and others in attaining spectacular sales to patients and their families. A very common affliction (some three million American sufferers). This book deals with diagnosis, treatment, joint protection, exercise, diet, insurance, rehab. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Rating
4 Stars! from Doody
Look this: Obesity Prevention and Public Health or Great Chicken Cookbook for People with Diabetes
Nearly Departed: Or, My Family and Other Foreigners
Author: Brenda Cullerton
Adarkly hilarious memoir about the final passage in the lives of the author's wildly eccentric parents -- a journey to the impenetrably remote and foreign land of her own backyard
Brenda Cullerton's parents were always a bit strange. Her mother gardened in curlers, pop-it beads, and black baggy underwear and was so afraid of lightning that she slept in rubber boots. Her greatest disappointment in life was the fact that her husband became a wealthy businessman, an entrepreneur who eventually took to hiding wads of cash in the toes of moldy old shoes in the barn. This was a family to escape from -- and Brenda did. But when she starts making trips home to care for her mother and father in their last year, Brenda finds that advancing age and illness have made their earlier behaviors seem downright normal. She also finds a concrete wall dividing her mother's house in two, a brother living in a tar-paper shack on the lawn, a seventy-one-year-old pot-smoking uncle planning to shoot Canada geese down at the pond, and a barefoot caregiver/nurse from Ghana who weeds with a very large machete and dreams of hunting local "bush meat." After years of traveling the world, Brenda Cullerton comes home to the strangest land she's ever visited and discovers that it is loving, not leaving, that saves her. Equal parts humor and heart-break, The Nearly Departed is a love letter to parents, family, and home -- however strange they may be.
author of THINK OF ENGLAND and IN THE GLOAMING - Alice Elliott Dark
A Triumph of compassion. . . . This is a wise and fascinating book.
author of RUNNING WITH SCISSORS - Augusten Burroughs
Hilarious and charming and loony and quite nearly perfect.
The Miami Herald, 5/18/03
.. is wildly humorous, bracing, even embracing...a tone-perfect sense of anecdote, and a commodious and forgiving heart...
O Magazine
A wise, courageous, brutally honest and darkly hilarious memoir . . . about all the ways shame mutilates the spirit and how love can help us let it go.
Publishers Weekly
Advertising slogan writer Cullerton tells the unexpectedly funny story of her "nearly departed," "brilliantly impaired" family. Picture her mom wearing "three pairs of glasses, one on top of the other," gardening in her Connecticut yard in her underwear. Or her formerly globe-trotting playboy dad, now bedridden, hurling curses worthy of a Tourette's sufferer, demanding his soda. As Cullerton meditates on her dotty family's eccentricities, she realizes there's a method to their madnesses. From her 71-year-old pot-smoking Uncle Larry, who "could be Hunter Thompson's version of a gonzo Santa Claus," to her ditsy Aunt Janet, who can't understand why the chickens in the butcher shop only have two legs, there's a desperate drive in all of them to escape the mediocrity of sameness, refusing to celebrate holidays and anniversaries ("commercial events invented by `Hellmark' ") or to live in the houses they actually own (more than one sleeps in the car with one hand on the wheel). While the anecdotes are amusing-e.g., her mother believes Barney is black, not purple; she parks in handicapped spaces, telling her daughter to limp as they leave-there's no mistaking it was often painful being raised by such people. Cullerton's mom enjoyed being difficult, seeing herself like sand irritating an oyster's membrane. But as this memoir shows, from such grit come pearls. By the time both parents are finally "departed," Cullerton begins to realize they haven't quite gone; they're with her, in her, still. Photos. (May 2) Forecast: Early attention, including a luncheon for the New York-based media, should get this book moving. Cullerton has connections to magazines, which should help, along with the cartoony jacket art. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Having an odd relative or two is part of most people's lives and is usually a source of both irritation and humor. For fashion writer Cullerton (Geoffrey Beene), it is all that and more. Although she lived in a seemingly normal home in suburban Connecticut, her family was more than a little eccentric. Her mother favored wearing three pairs of glasses, each on top of the other, and used to garden in a pair of baggy black underpants and a lace bra. Her father hid cash in pairs of old shoes, while her brother set up living quarters in a tar-paper shack in his parents' backyard. This memoir contains many amusing anecdotes about these and other characters in Cullerton's life but does not stop at mere storytelling. Cullerton writes from the perspective of an adult whose parents are now aging and becoming feeble. She asks poignant questions of herself that reveal her love for the strange people she calls her own and the heartbreak they have caused her. This is a cut above the average memoir, as it leads the reader to introspection, especially regarding the meaning of family. For larger public libraries where memoirs are popular.-Deborah Bigelow, Leonia P.L., NJ Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Magazine journalist Cullerton's debut excavates the emotional rubble left in the wake of her family's passage through life. First there is a lull, when readers might mistake this memoir for a piece of comic absurdism: the final, even odder years of two already eccentric parents and a select cast of strange characters who live with them on the family property in Connecticut. Cullerton's mother, given to gardening in her black lace underwear in suburban New England, had always been a step out of the frame, with a wicked tongue that neatly cut people down to size. Today she is a caricature of herself; what was once vital is now purely intolerant when not purely unhinged. Cullerton's father had once seemed urbane, but his "stealthlike humor [and] light, deft touch" have degenerated into "a heavy-handed coarseness, a vulgarity, that made me cringe." Their daughter visits often as they dwindle toward their graves, scraping away the overburden until it bleeds, to arrive at "a place where there are no metaphors . . . the subconscious ceases to exist": her childhood. She gathers episodes, develops themes, puzzles them into an unsettling picture of fear, desertion, grief, and isolation. And it gives her dreadful pause, for she learned early the survival mechanism of flight and disappearance. "What if fear, rage, arrogance, and despair, like my genetic dispositions for alcoholism, osteoporosis, strokes, and cancer, are hardwired into my brain?" she asks. There is evidence of this, but also evidence that she's identified the enemy and taken countermeasures. Yet Cullerton's own internal wilderness is clearly far from tamed, and though it is full of hazards, she notes that "the edge is what keeps us onour toes." Yes, her parents were only human-"unbearably alive," she says-but that doesn't mean they should not have come with warning labels: Exposure to the contents herein is dangerous to your health. A history that comes alive as discomfiting flashes, then in great fearful helpings.
Table of Contents:
| Prologue | 3 | |
| Seven months earlier | ||
| "I have been in tens and tens of houses since aff-rica." | 7 | |
| "Chop! chop! wicky! wicky!" | 15 | |
| "Wahoo! wah! the indian will never die!" | 21 | |
| "Terror is your family crest." | 29 | |
| "I'm a cripple. i'm entitled." | 37 | |
| "I am a stubborn prick." | 47 | |
| "You're nothing but a depraved sadist!" | 55 | |
| "Only the nouveaux swim in pools." | 71 | |
| "Only lazy slobs sit on lawn mowers!" | 83 | |
| "Don't look! avert thine eyes." | 99 | |
| "Handicapped? what jackass invented that one?" | 115 | |
| "So this is how it feels to be famous?" | 125 | |
| "Why does your father want to kill kenny?" | 139 | |
| "I believe miss sewell is down here in my bushes." | 147 | |
| "Bend, you fool!" | 165 | |
| "Please, don't tell me. i don't want to know." | 173 | |
| The departures | ||
| Dad--june 1998 | 191 | |
| Mom--august 1998 | 203 | |
| The house--january 1999 | 211 | |
| A family update: september 2002 | 219 |
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