Kansas City Community Matters June 2016

Commun ty Matters Kansas City Presbyterian Manor

June 2016

Music Therapist Celebrates 15 Years at Kansas City Presbyterian Manor

COMING UP IN COMMUNITY MATTERS:

Everyone has a story to tell

August signals the beginning of school. What are your memories of school? Were you a teacher or lifelong student? Did you get a degree late in life? How did education shape your life?

If you’ve got a story to share, contact Tina Ashford, activity director, and your story could be featured in an upcoming edition of Community Matters.

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Diana Ice encourages everyone to join in during music therapy.

Diana Ice has been providing her soothing, rejuvenating and beneficial music therapy services to Kansas City Presbyterian Manor residents for 15 years, and we celebrated her in big way recently. Residents gathered at a reception in her honor, where she brought her usual smile and spirit in song.

Diana completed her master’s in music education with a major in music therapy in 1984. She’s served at a variety of different health institutions,

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before realizing her dream of starting her own music therapy contracting business. So what does a typical music therapy session look (or sound) like?

“A session is usually 30 to 35 minutes long. After I greet each resident personally, which allows me to quickly assess them, we begin. We always start out with our ‘hello’ song, which I composed, and which all the residents know and sing with me. Then we do our warm-ups, which include breathing, moving in rhythm, and singing a couple of familiar songs.

Peggy Howey, music therapy volunteer, and Diane Ice stand behind the cake created to honor 15 years of music therapy.

“Smiling is encouraged!” said Diana.

“The main body of the session will consist of movement, drumming, or

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Community Matters is published monthly for residents and friends of Kansas City Manor by Presbyterian Manors of Mid-America organization. Learn more at PresbyterianManors.org Peatric Gates, executive director Tina Ashford, activity director To submit or suggest articles for this publication, contact Tina at tashford@pmma.org.

Telephone: 913-334-3666 Fax: 913-334-2904 Address: 7850 Freeman, Kansas City, KS 66112-2133 Our mission: We provide quality senior services guided by Christian values.

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singing, depending on my goals for the day. We end the session by singing the ‘goodbye’ song. This is a typical format for my sessions, but the content, pace and approach varies according to the group with which I am working.”

Residents benefit from music therapy in many ways, including: • social interaction, feeling like part of the group • physical energy, which in some cases may mean simply waking up • memory recall • orientation to the day, holiday, season, etc.

• smiling • having fun All music therapy protocols are evidence-based, meaning that the methods have been researched and found to produce desired results.

Research has shown that, in general, people respond best to the music of the years during which they were

teenagers and young adults. So, for example, the music we use with older adults, say in their 80s, will be music of the 1950s. This is only a general rule, and we are aware of special requests, the resident’s background, and musical education,” said Diana.

Diana also serves as a church organist and piano accompanist, and she sings in the Lawrence Civic Choir and church choir. She leads a couple’s Bible study and loves reading, gardening, traveling, and the arts of all kinds. In addition to all this, she has two children and 15 grandchildren!

We’re so glad Diana has shared her expertise with us for the past 15 years, and she’s grateful to have had the opportunity to help others.

“I often hear family members of residents say that they are so surprised that their loved one who rarely, if ever, speaks, will sing all the words to an old, familiar song,” said Diana.

Why I decided to make friends with death We know we will die someday, so we must accept and plan for it

By Irene Kacandes for Next Avenue

While we may fear meeting death alone, most of us are actually more afraid of dying surrounded by the wrong kind of people — that is, by health care workers.

Yet that is all too likely to be our fate. Statistics are squirrely, but many point in this direction. Seven out of 10 Americans express the wish to die at home. More than 80 percent of patients say they want to avoid hospitalization and intensive care at the end of life. And yet, the current reality is that about threequarters of us actually die in some kind of institutional setting.

What is the source of this disconnect? As someone who has spent most of the last 15 years grappling with loved ones’ lifethreatening illnesses and deaths (and co-authored a book on the topic), I’ve come to the conclusion that it starts with our attitudes — with our failure to recognize that our births guarantee our deaths.

It starts with acceptance

Paradoxically, it is only by accepting death as a basic truth that we can make the most life-enhancing decisions, ones that pave the way for the kind of peaceful death most of us say we want.

Prominent among these is creating an advance care directive and —

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this is key — making sure that the people likely to be making treatment decisions at our end of life, including doctors and our family members, know what we’ve decided. This last critical step is taken all too rarely.

Indeed, one study reports that only 25 percent of doctors were aware of their patients’ advance directives.

Beyond such practical considerations, I have experienced how a deep awareness of mortality enhances the time we have to live. When I lost two of my closest friends to murder in 2001, I was forced to confront the reality that one moment we are here and the next we might simply not be, even in a tranquil, rural place like the Upper Valley of the Connecticut River, where I make my home.

Changing perspective

Is this my last moment on earth? While

relatively few of us will die violent or sudden deaths, asking this question has trained me to snap myself out of bad moods: If this is my last chance at

Credit: Getty Images

life as I’ve known it, I don’t want to be feeling this lousy or angry or annoyed, my inner voice would reason. How can I reframe my current circumstances? Could I possibly make something constructive happen right now?

This perspective proved invaluable when my father, who hadn’t lived a particularly healthy adult lifestyle, developed some of the most common health problems of our society: diabetes, neuropathy, arthritis, heart and kidney disease and dementia. When someone has as many problems as my father did, the health care system proposes a lot of solutions.

My family learned to ask: How will this treatment affect him while he is undergoing it and in its aftermath? If it is not too painful or disruptive, will it improve the quality of his life?

Is there any “good” that we can make happen in this stage of his suffering?

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By following our answers to such questions, we decided not to authorize a pacemaker for him, for instance, even though the rehabilitation home he was in threatened to discharge him if we did not. We responded in turn by organizing more help for our mother and bringing him home. That’s where my father died peacefully three years later, on hospice and surrounded by members of his family.

A scary diagnosis

This approach helped me directly, too, when I was diagnosed last year with early stage invasive breast cancer. Bouncing between shock, anxiety, and — amazingly enough — laughter, my husband and I tried to wade through the barrage of information we received by asking what kind of life I could be living during and after various treatments.

We presented the surgeon with a piece of paper that summarized our

lifestyle goals and included a question about what was likely to happen if we did nothing. When we opted for my having surgery and radiation treatment, we knew we were opting for frequent trips to the hospital. I would get dressed up to the nines and smile at as many people as would look at me. The one thing I was sure was under my control was not adding to the level of worry and sadness of the people in that space.

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Kansas City Presbyterian Manor 7850 Freeman Kansas City, KS 66112-2133 Return Service Requested

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Like most ordinary mortals, I do not know what’s next for me. But I know I am going to keep living my life to the hilt by making conscious choices. By being conscious about choices. If I’m lucky enough not to develop dementia, I plan to be doing, or getting ready to do, something I love.

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