FREE Webinar – Listening to Lived Experience: What People Living With Dementia Want You to Know About Compassionate Care and their Serious Illness

January 13th 4pm EST / 1PM PST

We hope you had a wonderful start to the new year! As January is Alzheimer’s Awareness Month, we bring you this insightful webinar led by Maria and Myrna. This podcast will highlight how dementia affects daily life, identity, communication, and relationships, examining how a palliative approach to care can support comfort, dignity, and person-centred decision-making throughout the illness trajectory.

Please sign up for this webinar using the form at the bottom of the page!

Learning Outcomes:

1. Describe the lived experience of a person with dementia and identify how dementia affects daily life, identity, communication, and relationships.
2. Recognize how a palliative approach can be integrated early in dementia care to support comfort, dignity, person-centred decision-making, and quality of life throughout the illness trajectory.
3. Understand what practical communication and care strategies are to improve safety, trust, and meaningful engagement with individuals living with dementia in long-term care, home care, and community settings.

On Groundhog Day — February 2, 1949 — a healthy baby girl was born in Saskatoon, Sask.

Her birthmother named her Leslie but was unable to care for her daughter at the time, so the newborn was placed under the care of family friends who called her Myrna.

Shortly after, Myrna’s adopted family moved to British Columbia. Her father was a trucker, and Myrna remembers moving through the province often.

Myrna had always wanted to have lots of her own children, and she gave birth to four daughters within five years before marrying her now-husband, Dave, in 1995. Dave brought his two sons into their blended family, and the couple spent much of their free time fishing around their home in Nelson, B.C.

Myrna and Dave started Pillar to Post Home Inspection together shortly after getting married, which ran successfully for many years until Myrna started to struggle with the math when working on the company’s bookkeeping.

She was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia in 2008, and her doctor gave her eight years to live. Shocked and afraid, Myrna and Dave moved to Maple Ridge to be closer to their kids.

Now, 12 years later, Myrna is going strong. Her diagnosis changed to mild cognitive impairment in 2011, and, while she still struggles with her short-term memory, Myrna is committed to sharing her experience to help others.

“I had people give to me when I was growing up, and it’s vital that I give back, that’s just part of who I want to be,” she says. “It was really crushing to think that I couldn’t be a productive citizen. So I did everything I could do to help and stay involved. Now, I’m super, super busy. And I’ve pretty much been really busy since I decided to become an advocate.”

As a member of 12 different committees, including Dementia Advocacy Canada, Myrna speaks publicly about living with dementia and helps with dementia support groups in her community. She participates in workshops and art projects at the University of British Columbia, and has had her poetry published by the university. In 2018, she also published a short children’s book called Sometimes my Nana, to help children understand dementia and why their grandma might call them by the wrong name.