'Our Friend Stuart Donnan has opened his heart and his experience to us...' Photo: Elemento Zeca / flickr CC.
Extreme caring
Margaret Heathfield is moved by a powerful personal story
Dear Beryl,’ wrote a friend to the author’s wife, ‘I hear that you have been struck down.’ Beryl had suffered a stroke. Stuart Donnan, in his new book Extreme Caring – You Have To Go On, tells the story of the sixteen years that followed, through Beryl’s subsequent illnesses and disabilities and the later additional problems of dementia until her death in 2015.
Our Friend Stuart Donnan has opened his heart and his experience to us, hoping that we will all have more understanding of situations like his and be able to appreciate the effects and the demands on all the carers who are involved. He has included Beryl’s experience too, in so far as it is recorded and recalled.
The book is also for people who are caring for, or have cared for, those with similar problems. So, it is helpful that he provides some clear medical education about the workings and the malfunctions of the heart and the cardiac system. It is also helpful that he has mentioned some published accounts of other people’s stories of experiencing a stroke and its aftermath in a variety of circumstances and with a variety of outcomes; included in the book, also, are mentions of helpful professionals and organisations.
Words and communication had been a fundamental and significant aspect of Beryl’s life, so it was especially poignant that speech, reading and writing were her major losses. Stuart describes the many inspiring examples of imaginative ways in which Beryl’s family tried to enhance her life and to compensate for her lost abilities and pleasures.
This is very honest writing. We are left in no doubt that ‘extreme caring’ is testing in the extreme and that the difficulties are overwhelming. This is the case even to a family as close and loving as Beryl’s and with an impressive array of friends and medical colleagues to support them. However, alongside the frustration, anger and desperation, there is the more positive theme of trying to find meaning in the experiences.
This search for meaning occupies the final chapters of the book, under the headings of art, music, silence and caring. In these sections we are given examples of ‘experiences and ideas we have had and shared and which have contributed to meaning in our lives and lifted us for a time, at least, out of the mundane and away from the duty’.
There is also a web address, which has full references and links to music and other sources, as well as all the illustrations in original colour. We are promised a second book by the author. This will deal with philosophical and theological reflections about these illnesses, about living with and caring for them, and about looking for meaning. Its title will be Faith when words and memory fail: Reflections on a spiritual life with stroke and dementia. This will be a welcome companion volume.
Extreme Caring – You Have To Go On by Stuart Donnan is published by DestinWorld Publishing Ltd at £9.99. ISBN: 9780995530706.
