Guest Joe Kalscheur discusses how planning for emergencies might look different for individuals with disabilities or people 50 and older. A disaster or emergency impacting your daily life can happen at anytime, sometimes without warning. Freezing temperatures, tornadoes, floods, fires, and other emergencies mean that everyone should have a plan in place. But if you’re 50 or older or have a disability, there are extra things you need to pay attention to. Thankfully, there are ways you can be prepared to respond safely and recover swiftly. Here to discuss how to plan is Joe Kalscheur, a public health specialist from the Eau Claire City-County Health Department.

As we brave the more serious sides of aging, it is important to incorporate ways to experience life’s lighter side to keep us balanced and be able to cope. In fact, laughter and a healthy dose of humor have been shown in studies to improve our physical, psychological, and social well-being. Tom Kidd of Balanced Wellness Services, a former health educator with approximately 30 years of teaching experience, sits down with Lisa Wells to discuss the benefits of finding humor and laughter later on in life.

Someone in the U.S. is diagnosed with some form of dementia every 65 seconds, and that number continues to grow as the population ages. Susan McFadden, co-founder of the Fox Valley Memory Project, sits down Lisa Wells to discuss how people with dementia and their loved ones can still experience joy with creativity and a shift in mindset.

It’s not often we hear the words “joy” and “dementia” in the same sentence. Dementia is hard and affects not only the person but their care partner and families – making it easy to find the gloom and doom. In order to find the light, it takes a bit of creativity and a shift in thinking as it pertains to dementia care. Susan McFadden, co-founder of the Fox Valley Memory Project and professor emerita of psychology at UW-Oshkosh, sits down with Lisa Wells to discuss different approaches to dealing with dementia that can make the journey a little less despondent and a bit brighter – starting with something as simple as re-defining the dementia “patient.”