On October 5, 2007, Renée Norman’s husband, Chris, was diagnosed with ALS or Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. When the doctors at the University of Virginia Medical Center diagnosed Chris, Renée wasn’t sure what ALS was. But she soon learned that it is a progressive neuromuscular disease that eventually paralyzes and kills a person. Chris had a very rapid case of ALS, and he passed away with grace and ease thirteen months after that initial visit to UVA. During that entire time, Renée was her husband’s loving, constant caregiver, and what she experienced and learned as she cared for him is shared in this book. This brutally honest account is no romantic tale like those often portrayed in movies, but a bare-knuckle retelling of the reality of this tragically debilitating and fatal disease and a loved one’s work in dealing with its impact on her husband, her children and herself. For the 29 percent of adults in this country who are unpaid caregivers, this book provides detailed do’s and don’ts for them and for those who want to help support the family. There are chapters that offer specific tips about what to do during hospital stays or operations and their aftermath. There also are suggestions on how to gracefully work with well-wishers who want to visit the home. Included are spreadsheets to help manage the health care, as well as, information on the necessary documents you and your loved one may need. Thanks to Renée’s meticulous note-taking and list-making, caregivers finally have a handy reference guide that assists the person with practical tools. At the same time, her compelling story brings awareness to the need to be a proactive advocate for your loved one — sometimes in unexpected areas. Additional information and free Excel spreadsheets for helping manage you or your loved one's medical care, are available on Renée's website: www.AMillionTinyThings.com.

A Million Tiny Things: My Experience in Caregiving

Medical Books

Norman, Renée

Nursing

Clementine Charles Publishing

This textual House of Mirrors explores and performs autobiography in/as re-search through the presentation of poetry, personal stories, and theoropoetic ruminations. The themes of writing, mothering, and teaching are reflected by examining the self/selves in the context of textual and living others. This book also incorporates the contributions of women’s autobiographical writings and provides some curricular applications for autobiography in education. Drawing upon feminist and literary thought, House of Mirrors reflexively enacts the possibilities, ethical complications, and disruptions of writing autobiographically about self, others, and autobiography.

House of Mirrors: Performing Autobiograph(icall)y in Language/Education

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers

Poetry. Jewish Studies. In this second collection of poetry, Renee Norman picks up several thematic threads from her award-winning first book, True Confessions, and weaves them into poems about mothering, aging and loss set in amongst the cultural traditions of family and Judaism. Relationships between mothers and daughters celebrated, deconstructed, and mourned, as the poems resonate with the slippage of time and the emptiness of hands once full and busy. Norman writes about the poignancy of motherhood, set against her own aging and the illness, death, and widowhood of aging parents. She also writes hopefully and with some humour as she navigates her daughter's growing pains, middle-age, her Jewish background, and the legacies our parents leave us.

Backhand Through the Mother (Inanna Poetry & Fiction Series)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Inanna Publications

Poetry. Women's Studies. This collection of both narrative and lyrical poetry moves between two strong voices that resonate with and against one another, a woman and a man, focusing on family relationships in all their intersections and differences. The poems are about daughters, granddaughters, son, mothers, spouses, and deal with love, sorrow, joy, loss, redemption: the stuff of living. Weaving through the collection are the words and spirit of Virginia Woolf, who has affected and inspired both poets over the course of their writing, parenting, teaching, and being.

Hearing Echoes (Inanna Poetry & Fiction Series)

Leggo, Carl

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Books by Norman, Renée