My name is Angil Tarach, and I am one of the new bloggers for AnnArbor.com. I am a registered nurse with a 30+ year passion for senior care and advocacy. It is my privilege and honor to be able to help the seniors and their families in our community with education, information and resources related to issues they are facing or will face.

Currently there are between 45 and 60 million people providing care for a loved one in the US. As 77 million Baby Boomers age that number is expected to more than double. I see families on a daily basis who have found themselves facing an unexpected illness or injury with a spouse, parent, or loved one, and are struggling to figure out the healthcare maze. I believe knowledge is power. The focus of my blogs will be to help people in our community by sharing 30+ years of my experience and education, so they are better equipped to handle and make decisions, and reduce their stress level, if or when they find themselves facing a crisis.

Since this is my introduction, I will share my background so you know how I started in senior care and advocacy and why I have spent all of my adult life in this field. My love of the elderly began when I started to work as an aide in a nursing home when I was 17. I had some significant experiences in that job that I have carried my whole life. One experience I originally wrote in a blog for Great Places Inc. turned out to cause a lot of emotion and attention. It was recently recognized as “one of the best articles I’ve ever read” in the Alzheimer’s Reading Room. This particular experience that I will share with you now, has directed the way I care for patients, and how I direct my agency, Visiting Angels.

When I worked as an aide at 17 years old, one of my residents--I'll call her "Ann"-- couldn't speak or do anything for herself. She quietly lay in bed day after day. Ann never had a visitor, so I knew nothing about her.

One evening our assignment was to clean our residents' closets and drawers. While I was working in Ann's room, I found a box. In it were no less than 30 letters and cards. I sat on the floor and started to read them, tears falling from my eyes. They were love letters from a husband to his wife. Never had I known, or even heard about, such profound and amazing love. This woman, lying there alone, seemingly unloved, had actually shared a fairy tale love, rare and amazing, with an adoring spouse. It was through these letters that I got to know a patient who couldn’t tell me anything about herself. Learning about her life allowed me to have a special relationship with her. As far as I knew, her deceased husband was all she had, and now I felt more responsibility to care for her, for him.

From time to time I would read his letters to her. I don’t know whether Ann could understand--or even hear--anything I said, but I felt that her spirit heard and understood. My three-decade passion has been based on empathy. Can you imagine being in Ann's shoes? Can you understand what it must be like to have lived a fairy tale life with a best friend, experience a love like no other, only to lose that person and decline to the point where you're alone and unable to care for yourself?

Ann's is not just one story. It's one of a countless number of stories. There are thousands of elders living in nursing homes, alone and unable to care for themselves. What kind of care do they get when their healthcare workers know nothing about them, and don’t even think about what their lives were like before they ended up, helpless, in a nursing home?

I know from my own experience that patients like Ann are not even talked to or treated with the compassion that is essential to providing good care. Instead, they're just work to be done rather than care to be given.

I have spent time with thousands of seniors and their families. Every person and family is unique, and has their own unique set of circumstances, but the situations they face are common among our senior population. In the years I have spent caring for seniors, and the changes that have occurred, one fact remains the same, we as a nation need to provide better care and treatment of our older citizens. We also need to support the millions of unpaid family caregivers that are providing care estimated at a value of over 355 billion annually.

I am advocating for better treatment and care in our community, as well as nationally. I am writing for a number of national websites as well currently writing a book titled Behind the Old Face.

Although I have limitless content for blogs here, I prefer to have an interactive format. I welcome your questions, and ideas for topics you are interested in learning more about. After all, my focus is helping the people in Ann Arbor and the surrounding communities.

I look forward to this new responsibility, and hearing from you!

Angil's blog can be seen at www.angiltarachrn.com, or she can be emailed at visitingangelswc@comcast.net.