Pati Bedwell, an elder care coordinator at Takacs McGinnis Elder Care Law, a Life Care Planning Law Firm in suburban Nashville, Tennessee, found out about POCD when it happened to her mother. It was a routine colonoscopy, but Pati’s mother was given a new medication with her anesthesia. “Mom jokingly told the nurse she wanted something so she’d forget she was there,” remembers Pati. “The nurse told Mom that the medication would help wipe her short-term memory, so she probably wouldn’t remember much of anything of the procedure. That sounded good to Mom.”

From public defender representing people accused of murder to elder law attorney helping older adults get care. No, it’s not the plot of a TV drama, it’s the career trajectory of Kathleen Flammia, founder of the Flammia Elder Law Firm, a Life Care Planning Law Firm in Winter Park, Florida.

I’ve fallen and I can’t get up. It may sound like an infomercial cliché, but it’s a horror story that often takes families by surprise.

Julia Keck Price understands it well. She lived it. “I stopped by to visit my 89-year-old grandmother one day and she didn’t come to the door,” said Price, a Life Care Planning Attorney at Elder Law of East Tennessee, a Life Care Planning Law Firm in Knoxville. “Turns out that she had fallen and had been laying there for several days.”

Price’s nightmare occurred just as she was beginning her career as an elder law attorney.

During the month of May, two awareness events honoring older adults coincide: Older Americans Month and National Elder Law Month. For Barbara Boone McGinnis, a Certified Elder Law Attorney and partner at Takacs McGinnis Elder Care Law, a Life Care Planning Firm in Hendersonville, Tennessee, the month of May offers plenty of opportunities to reflect on her chosen legal field.

At some point during the long-term care journey, nearly every family caregiver will feel overwhelmed by the amount of care their aging, sick, or disabled loved one requires. But how much stress is too much? There’s a fine line between “normal” stress and the stress described by Dr. Timothy Brigham, a well-known medical educator. Dr. Brigham describes stress as “the basic confusion created when one’s mind overrides the body’s desire to choke the living daylights out of someone who desperately deserves it.”