Nursing Home

A simple yet profound shift, seeing people as people is an idea so simple you'll swear you've heard it a million times but so profound you'll never stop learning from it. Kimberly White discovered it in a chain of nursing homes whose leaders, nurses, and housekeepers saw their patients, not as tasks to be ticked off a to-do list, but as valuable human beings. White helps you to adopt this transformative shift with warm encouragement, insightful guidance, and powerfully moving, true accounts of extraordinary human goodness.

In this book, author and biologist Marcy Houle shares her personal journey of caring for her father, a surgeon, who developed Alzheimer's disease, and later her mother, who succumbed to other medical conditions.Like many children of aging parents, Marcy often felt powerless traveling this sad trajectory - watching them fall through the cracks of a fragmented and confusing healthcare system, where professionals often wrote off their symptoms as "just old age".

Being optimistic doesn’t come naturally to Grace Manning, especially not these days. Her family life has just been turned upside down, and things are getting weird with her best friend Eric. But at least she’s happy at her after-school job at a nursing home, thanks to Mr. Sands, a resident with Lou Gehrig’s disease who keeps up with Grace’s sarcasm, teaches her how to cheat at poker, and even lets her give him a Mohawk. And then one day, Mr. Sands asks Grace to help him die.