Judy Cornish – From Theory to Practice Person Centered Dementia Care, the DAWN Method

Judy Cornish is an author, founder of the Dementia & Alzheimer’s Wellbeing Network (DAWN®), creator of the DAWN Method® of dementia care, and a retired elder law attorney. Her two books (The Dementia Handbook and Dementia With Dignity) take person-centered dementia care from theory to practice by identifying the skills not lost to dementia. Through DAWN, Cornish provides online training programs for families and professional caregivers, as well as certification courses for agencies and facilities. Cornish’s life work has been making dignified dementia care and aging in place available for all.

Topic:

• You’re an attorney; how did you become involved with dementia and dementia care?
• Why do you say that your work takes “person-centered care” from theory to practice?
• How can there be strengths in dementia?
• What is the DAWN Method?
• What’s the most important thing for families to know when a loved one begins to experience dementia?

Hanh Brown: [00:00:00] Thank you Judy, for being here with me today, I’m really eager to learn about this exciting new method.

Judy Cornish: [00:01:31] Thank you for inviting me, Hannah. It’s just always a treat to be able to speak and share what I learned from my clients.

Hanh Brown: [00:01:40] So, would you mind telling the audience where you’re from, where you are now from a career standpoint in how you got there?

Judy Cornish: [00:01:47] Well, I’m Canadian by birth. Um, I’ve been in the United States, most of my adult life and an attorney by training in that back in 2010, I thought that I would leave my practice in Portland, Oregon, and I was looking for a small town near the mountains.

[00:02:07] And I ended up in Moscow, Idaho, and from practicing the law and thinking I was going to be just mostly retired and living a quieter life. I ended up becoming involved with a neighbor who was experiencing Alzheimer’s. So for me to be in the world of dementia care, now didn’t come from working with a family member or experiences with family, but with a neighbor.

Hanh Brown: [00:02:33] You’re an attorney. So you got involved with dementia care through a neighbor. We’ve actually had several people on this program with a background in law. So do you think there’s something about studying and practicing law that makes people more inclined to help out more vulnerable populations.

Judy Cornish: [00:02:49] like the seniors?

[00:02:50] You know, if that could be for me the practice of the law, I hadn’t experienced prior to going to law school where I was working with the mentally ill in a facility. And that facility was in the same building as an Alzheimer’s unit. And up to that time, I’d never met anybody or been involved with an elder who was experiencing dementia.

[00:03:14] And I wasn’t, even, at that time, I was simply working in the same building, but that gave me such a desire to see a change, to be able to do something, to change the way we respond to people who are experiencing cognitive impairment. So that’s a bit of a I’m wandering from your question a little bit. For me, it was very specific because when I went to law school, I suddenly found myself for the first time in my life, having to use rational thinking skills more than what I was really comfortable with, which was intuitive thinking skills.

[00:03:52] And my undergraduate work. I had studied literature and language, um, as a child. I studied art. That’s considered an art prodigy in my high school years. And to go from art literature, all of these more intuitively based pursuits and to suddenly find myself required to use rational thinking alone, that is actually where the Don method came from.

[00:04:18] It was from personal experience and it was from when I first started spending more time with that neighbor. This lovely woman lived across the street and. Her daughter had dropped by one evening and said, we’re going to have to put mom into a care facility because she keeps losing the car. And I thought, really she’s just forgetful.

[00:04:38] She shouldn’t be locked up. She shouldn’t have to leave her home. And so I started spending more time with her. I volunteered to help. And I think within two weeks I had half a dozen seniors, other neighbors who the children would call me and say, we hear that you’re working with mom. Could you spend some time with my dad, he’s becoming a little forgetful.

[00:05:00] And that first year I really had no intention of leaving the law practice and beginning to become involved with dementia care, but to be spending so much time with my elders and elders who were experiencing the loss of memory skills. And I could see that something else was very upsetting as well. It took me about six months to recognize that what was happening for them was exactly the opposite of what happened to me when I went to law school.

[00:05:31] So me going to law school, I suddenly found myself unable to use intuitive thinking skills that had served me so well throughout all of my other studies and throughout life. And now here I was spending time with my elders and. All of them experiencing very different types of dementia coming from different walks of life, different personalities, different skillsets.

[00:05:54] And yet each of them are going through this same distress. And finally, the penny dropped and I realized, Oh, what’s happening is they can’t use rational thinking skills anymore. Just like I couldn’t use intuitive thinking skills in my law studies. And so from that, I began to think not about people being impaired or losing ground.

[00:06:18] I started thinking, no, this is just skillsets. This is cognitive skills and people who are experiencing distress because your skill set is changing. Very definitely my law training that led me to recognize that that change in skill sets and the distress we feel as a result when our skills are changing.

Hanh Brown: [00:06:38] That decline is a very gradual decline and it takes a special person, a special heart and patience to work with folks in dementia and understand, and even recognize what you just described is a change in skillset.

Judy Cornish: [00:06:53] Yep. Thank you. Every day, I’m interacting with other people. And every day there are people who have to put up with me having a worst memory than they do that.

[00:07:02] I have fewer memory skills or I’m accommodating somebody else whose skills are better than mine. Everyday people accommodate my lack of intuitive thinking skills in comparison to theirs or my lack of rational thinking skills in comparison to theirs their attention skills. So we do that all the time.

[00:07:20] And when somebody begins to experience dementia, it’s on a more profound level, but we should still be accommodating and recognize that simply what is needed is to continue to use our skills to our best ability. And when somebody can’t use memory skills or they can’t use rational thinking skills or attention skills, then we do that for them.

[00:07:43] And we support them in what skills they are still using.

Hanh Brown: [00:07:47] And you know what, depending on the level of acuity and what phase they are in D dementia sometimes, or oftentimes it’s not about words, right? Yes. Not about words it’s being present. It’s reading what’s inside their mind, their heart, their history in bringing out some of those moments that you’ve shared and also somehow create a story around it.

[00:08:11] Something that they imaginative. So. It’s not necessarily about logic and whatever that is in their mind. As a loved one, you go along with it, you become imaginative, just like they are. That’s my opinion. That’s what we had to do with my family, my mom and dad. But thank you for sharing dad. Like I said, it takes a special person, special heart to recognize and see it as a change in skill set, a change in the ability to communicate.

[00:08:42] And you’re right. We every day make accommodations to one another and you have something that is a stronger skill set than mine, and then vice versa. So we accommodate, and I think we ought to take on that principle in caring for folks with dementia, you have two books, not just one. What made you want to write?

[00:09:05] Not just one book, but two books about dementia.

Judy Cornish: [00:09:09] It was from 2010 until 2015. I was just fascinated with the process, the changing skills that people experience as they’re experiencing dementia. I spent, during that five years, I spent most of my time, more of my time with people who were experiencing dementia than with people who weren’t.

[00:09:29] And it took me that long to really begin to see first, to see the pattern, and then to be able to test the pattern and see whether that held true. With people who had very all simers or vascular dementia or frontal lobe, all the different types of dementias, was it the same pattern? And so then after I was had enough experience with different types of people in different types of dementia, then I sat down and wrote my second book.

Hanh Brown: [00:10:00] What is the name of the first one in the second one?

Judy Cornish: [00:10:02] The first book I published was the dementia handbook. But that book, actually, I wrote it after I had written dementia with dignity. And the reason I wrote the dementia handbook was because a friend of mine, he apologized and he said, Judy, I hate to tell you this, but you wrote the wrong book.

[00:10:22] You have to write another book first. And so the dementia handbook, I tried to write very succinctly explaining that pattern, the pattern of skills, captain, the skills lost. And it varies from one person to another. Some of us will lose rational thinking skills before we lose memory skills. Some of us lose attention skills.

[00:10:47] Predominantly first, somebody who’s experiencing all summaries. We’ll lose memory in a very specific manner, much different from the person who’s experiencing vascular dementia. The dementia handbook explains the pattern and out of the. The pattern of skills lost. The more important part is the pattern of skills not lost because if too often, I think, and this is one of the first things that I teach when I’m teaching families about dementia is that yes, we lose so much to dementia, but we do not lose all our skills.

[00:11:24] And if our companions understand what skills we’ve lost. And the ones we continue to use, then they can support companionship and they stop inadvertently frustrating us and embarrassing us. So the dementia handbook explains the pattern. And then with dementia, with dignity, I give it’s a much larger book and I give lots of anecdotes and explanation stories.

[00:11:52] Examples. Now that we recognize what those skills are that we keep. How then do we work with somebody so that we can have companionship rather than constant conflict?

Hanh Brown: [00:12:04] Yeah. I’ll tell you. It’s a journey is a journey for any family members from the moment they first recognize to the moment of acceptance denial, then acceptance, then feeling alone, unprepared, maybe even shameful.

[00:12:21] It’s a whole journey of emotions that you go through. And I’m just really glad that we have a place that we can talk openly to bring awareness, educate, and just have people take it on as if, as part of it. It’s part of an aging process and it has to be celebrated no matter what. And I think when you can come to the place of celebration, that’s a big deal because honestly, there’s nothing to celebrate in my mind when I first learn about it.

[00:12:53] In my mind, it was all decline. When you can come to the place where you can honor and celebrate and laugh and cry together, and you’re doing the best that you can for your loved one, when you can come to that place. Do you know what I mean? And when you can talk about it openly and laugh and cry and that’s okay.

Judy Cornish: [00:13:12] There’s so much to grieve for when you first begin to suspect that a loved one is going to be experiencing dementia. You have to grieve for the changes they’re going to experience and the life they won’t be able to live any longer, the way it’s going to change the family interactions, the way it will change every relationship that person has.

[00:13:35] And that’s not even considering the financial costs of. Trying to care for somebody in the United States, who’s experiencing dementia. The most critical thing we can do is realize that once dementia does come into the picture, that relationship will be changed. And we can’t continue to interact in the same manner as we once did, because as our loved one is losing these skills and to lose rational thinking skills means to lose language skills.

[00:14:07] No. And some people will begin to experience word salad. They’ll think they’re talking and expressing themselves sensibly, but they can’t. They are around other people simply begin to lose words, vocabulary. But the good news in that, even though we lose our language skills, we never lose. We do not lose our nonverbal communication.

[00:14:32] And so if it’s so important that if you have a relationship with someone who’s experiencing dementia, you really need to know that because they are reading every fleeting expression that crosses your face. Every gesture, your posture, the moment you walk into the room, they are reading your nonverbal communication.

Hanh Brown: [00:14:52] You may not know that you may not know that. Okay. That’s so important. What you just said, essentials to me because I’m with you. Yeah, it’s the rational side, but suddenly they gained so much from their other senses and they never booze their heart, their emotions it’s behind there.

Judy Cornish: [00:15:12] it’s all there because we lose rational skills, but not intuitive thinking skills.

[00:15:17] Then that means that we feel emotion, just all of the emotions of the human experience, just as. Strongly, we lose the ability to name it or explain it, or look at your face and see you and recognize your emotion, the companions, emotion, or expression, but not be able to interpret it, like to understand why the person is feeling that way.

[00:15:41] So to me, I, if, if I could just teach everyone that. We even when I don’t understand the word tree sad, I’ve forgotten the word, or I can no longer put that into words. I still feel sadness. But at the same time, I continue to feel all of the joy, beauty of every kind that by census can pick up anything. I can see, hear, taste, smell, touch every all of my senses are there because that’s part of our intuitive thinking skills.

[00:16:13] And so we have this ability. We have the opportunity when somebody is experiencing dementia, to realize that even though they no longer can drift into the past using their memory skills or anticipate the future and prepare for it, using rational thinking skills are a hundred percent present experiencing the present.

[00:16:36] All of the emotions and all of the beauty that comes from sensory stimulation is a hundred percent available. So the rest are as they’re companions. If we know that we can shape their experience and make their lives beautiful.

Hanh Brown: [00:16:52] Wow. I love that. Everything that you were saying, I’m right there with you. So thank you for communicating it so beautifully and writing a book about that.

[00:17:02] And I hope that. People that are listening will take it on full gear and along the journey, find a way to know that it’s, it’s a journey. It’s how do I say this? Although it’s a decline, but you still can celebrate it. And it is a journey and there’s a lot of innings in this journey has a lot of moments, ups and downs, and it’s a roller coaster.

[00:17:24] Let’s face it. Okay. But at the same time, there are many celebrations along the way. So you gotta remember that.

Judy Cornish: [00:17:34] Yeah. I love the metaphor of journey because that is so true. There’s no way to avoid it for most of us. When a family member is experiencing dementia, you can’t just walk away. You love the person.

[00:17:46] You will be walking that journey with them one way or the other. And I love that saying there’s no way out, but through, so we can’t avoid stop resisting. And if we welcome and if we put one foot in front of the other, along the way, there are different joys and there are different gifts than you would have had on the journey.

[00:18:10] You would have walked with your elder, had they not experienced dementia? Absolutely. So it’s different terrain. It’s different topography. But there are gifts there too.

Hanh Brown: [00:18:23] I love what you said. Don’t resist it. Just welcoming.

Judy Cornish: [00:18:29] Very true.

Hanh Brown: [00:18:30] So now you say that your work takes a person centered care from theory to practice.

[00:18:36] So can you explain to me what that mean? What you mean by that?

Judy Cornish: [00:18:41] Yeah. It’s I love the concept of being person centered because to me, the very first thing I experienced as I walked the journey of understanding dementia, as I do that, I had to move away from perceiving a person who has been broken by a disease who now due to a disease is experiencing symptoms and the symptoms are dementia related behaviors, and we’ve got a whole list of them.

[00:19:12] And then since we don’t have a cure, they must live the disease and exhibit symptoms. And to me, that was heartbreaking and just, there’s no answer there, but instead, if you don’t look at it from that perspective, if we think about the person who is experiencing dementia is just being a person who’s experiencing something in human life.

[00:19:38] Children. We take a child from birth. We carry the infant. We take care of every need. The infant has. We don’t expect them to behave like fully functioning and capable adults. We don’t expect them to react like adults, but we don’t consider their failure to react and behave like adults as being disease.

[00:20:01] We think of children as having their own set of skills and they are learning and growing. That to me was the first step in moving from a disease centered perspective of dementia, to a person centered perspective of dementia. Now that I recognize the person, rather than being, looking at them and looking for disease and symptoms.

[00:20:24] Now I’m looking at a person who’s having experiences and who has a certain skillset. Now I need to know the skillset. So if I’m person centered, well, let’s put it this way. If I’m experiencing dementia and my loved ones, my companions love me and are focused on me. And they’re not thinking about me as having disease.

[00:20:48] If they don’t understand what skills I’m still using much as they love me much as they want to help me much as they want to provide good care for me. They will slip up. They will be inadvertently giving me messages, like from their non-verbal communication, not realizing that I’m picking those messages out.

[00:21:09] And so there’ll be inadvertently embarrassing me and frustrating me if they don’t understand that when I lose my rational thinking skills, that means reasoning with me is asking me to do what I cannot do. Just in the same manner as when, if I were to lose my vision skills pointing and telling me Judy, look over there, that will do no good.

[00:21:34] And so when I don’t have reasoning skills, asking me to understand reasons or explaining things to me, or if I don’t have memory skills saying Oprah, remember we did this, you did that. Then we went there. Remember, you’re just, you’re asking me to do what I cannot do. And so to be truly person centered, you need to understand my, my strengths, what I can do, but I can’t do.

[00:22:01] That’s where my heart is, is helping people understand that we’re inadvertently being cruel and unkind by demanding or expecting that somebody who’s experiencing dementia continue to use certain skills that. That they no longer have.

Hanh Brown: [00:22:17] Yeah. You have to see the person, your local one where they are in the moment.

[00:22:22] And then forward months and years from now and accepting that it’s on the decline in, like you said, the relationship has changed, perhaps you can even say, I don’t know if this is right or not, but like it’s full circle. They at one time care for you as a toddler, and now you are going to care for them as they decline in more ways than what you remember them to be.

[00:22:45] When they were your parents. So it’s almost like a full circle. And I think just more people just have to come to a realization that it’s too common. It’s, it’s here in more to come and I think it’s good to get educated and take it on, take it on and just do what you’re, what we’re talking about right now.

[00:23:12] And I think when folks come to that place, We then can still have dementia folks continue to thrive at whatever capacity that they can, as opposed to just, I don’t want to say the word, locking them up, isolating them, putting them away, so to speak. Okay. So there’s no need for that.

Judy Cornish: [00:23:30] No, there isn’t no Moscow, Idaho.

[00:23:33] That was where I spent 10 years in the first five years from 2010 to 2015. That was when I spent almost all of my waking hours with people. Who were experiencing dementia. Most of my clients had children who lived elsewhere and were living alone in their own homes with dementia. And so I had this unique opportunity to work with people who have not been moved out of their familiar homes and who were not already dealing with this second set of traumas being removed from your home.

[00:24:11] I think when you circling back to you’re talking about this circle of care, and I think that’s a circle of care is what we’re talking about. We care for the children. We care for children and infants. We accept their skillsets the way they are less than an adult and adults expect to care for children.

[00:24:32] For some reason, in the United States, we don’t expect that adults should care for the elders. It really bothers me. I, I always get the impression that in the United States we have childhood and adulthood, and then we have broken adulthood as if there is no elderhood to be a child. That’s the time to play and to learn to be an adult.

[00:24:56] That’s the time to do, to accumulate. Um, to accumulate skills, to produce, to accumulate skills and assets, and then you cease being an adult and you become an elder and to be an elder, it’s the time to be, to think, to share, not to accumulate, not to do not to know it’s the time to share and be. That’s when, once again, we need to be cared for.

[00:25:28] And so as adults, I think we need to recognize that we care for children and elders share, and children learn their times of life. Once you look at it, from that perspective, the person then who is an elder and experiencing dementia, doesn’t need to be locked up because we care for them and accommodate their changing skills.

Hanh Brown: [00:25:50] I think it has a lot to do with cultural paradigm shift somewhere along the way we just looked down and the aging populations just like what you and I talked about and it’s going to take every single one of us. I know we can complain. We can talk about it. And we can say such and such who needs to do this and that, but you know what it boils down to it’s every single one of us have a responsibility to be a part of this show.

[00:26:17] So I’m just so glad that we are having this conversation. And I hope that more and more we’ll be listening and then taking on that responsibility and be a part of that shift because it isn’t just other people’s problem. It’s everybody.

Judy Cornish: [00:26:32] Yeah, this is our society. And we do need to be if we don’t care for each other as families, but also as people fall through the cracks.

[00:26:42] And then you do end up with an entire population of elders who are living in care facilities.

Hanh Brown: [00:26:49] I agree. Can you tell us about Dawn, the Dawn method that you’ve developed? I know that we touch on it already, but the, who does this method affect the patient? Their loved ones or both?

Judy Cornish: [00:27:01] It’s both. Okay. I’ve been accused of writing with empathy for the person who’s experiencing dementia and ignoring the needs of the caregiver.

[00:27:10] But first actually to study the Dawn method and I teach it in eight classes over eight weeks because it’s a journey and it’s a journey of self discovery because we really can’t. Recognize and support the needs of a person who is experiencing dementia, unless we recognize what our human cognitive abilities really are.

[00:27:32] When I teach the Don method, I teach it from the perspective of the emotional needs that we experience. When we begin to experience a loss of cognitive skills, I use a flour. It’s a feedback loop model. Metaphor for Don. And what I teach is that first we need to recognize that once you’re experiencing dementia and you lose rational thinking skills and memory skills, you won’t be able to manage your own moods anymore.

[00:28:02] You’re not in control of them. You lack the skills to change them. And without rational thinking, you lack the ability to understand why somebody else might be feeling the way they are. It starts at the very center of the Don flower is his mood management and helping the caregiver come to understand how we normally manage mood and how we can’t.

[00:28:25] When we begin to experience dementia, lose these skills. And then from there, since the person is going to become ever more confused, they need to begin to feel safe, being confused. Because the person is going to need evermore assistance and help with tasks. They need to begin to feel safe, needing help.

[00:28:48] And so that’s the core of the Dawn method. The first three tools are security related and then the last for our wellbeing, none of us can feel comfortable for long. The Don method are security related. And then the out of four pedals, that’s bringing beauty into somebody’s life and those are wellbeing, emotional needs, and none of us can feel happy for long.

[00:29:11] If every time we try to engage in conversation that we fail, or if we feel that we have no control over ourselves, our bodies or our lives. Or if we feel that we have no sense, no value that we have nothing to bring to our relationships and that nobody values us in our relationships. And then the last is secure future.

[00:29:35] And that we each have a very specific security symbol that comes from childhood and life experiences. And once we begin to develop dementia, we need that addressed even more carefully. And so that’s the, the seven tools at the Dawn method. It’s a seven emotional needs, three for security and four for wellbeing that losing cognitive skills will cause.

Hanh Brown: [00:29:59] Wow, wonderful. I’ll make sure to put that in the show notes, the books that you have. I think it’s wonderful. So now, what is the most important thing for families to know when a loved one begins to experience dementia, you have tips for loved ones of someone recently experiencing dementia to something for them to first thing you would say to them.

Judy Cornish: [00:30:21] I think here in the United States, the first thing I, and it’s the first class I teach. It’s the first thing that comes out is the issue of a person’s ability to perceive reality. So we always hear, is it lying to agree with somebody’s version of reality when they’re experiencing dementia? And so the first thing we have to grapple with is if somebody is losing memory skills and that means they’re losing the ability to go retrieve memories.

[00:30:53] So if they don’t know what happened a minute ago, a day ago, a year ago, and if they also lack rational thinking skills, So that if you explain your reality, which is the actual one and ask them to compare yours and theirs, and they don’t have the skills to do that, can we really demand and insist that they accept our common reality if they don’t have the skills to grapple with it, to arrive at it?

[00:31:24] So that’s where I begin is with families. Is this is your elder most of the time, not always. But this is another human being. This is your loved one. And out of respect, it’s so important to recognize that the reality they are being forced to believe is true is a result of their lack of skills, losing skills, losing the ability to use memory and the ability to use reasoning.

[00:31:53] And so that’s where it all begins. If we can be respectful of their altered sense of reality. There’s so much less complex.

Hanh Brown: [00:32:02] Yeah. Everyone has their journey, but it’s very everything that you describe is one that I have been on. But I think for my family, I would say that we’re in a better place because no matter the dynamics, the complexities and the strife that goes along during the journey.

[00:32:19] I think you need to come to a place as a family to realize that we all want to do the best mom and dad, we all want to do the best for them. And it’s very important to get to the place that you still have a family after your loved ones. It’s very important because like I said, the more family members you have more in the mix and may be more stride.

[00:32:44] but it’s very important to stay in United.

Judy Cornish: [00:32:53] Yeah, because once your family and bunch of loved ones leave, you will need each other. You will. And we have to accept that if I’m living with my parent or my loved one, who’s experiencing dementia. I know so much more than the person who lives even five minutes away or an, especially the person who is across the country and we can’t help, but have differing perceptions of what’s going on for all spread out.

[00:33:16] So important to respect and listen to each other.

Hanh Brown: [00:33:21] Absolutely. That’s it. Now how about tips for people who have recently been diagnosed with dementia? So what would you say to them?

Judy Cornish: [00:33:32] Hi, I would say have your loved one, three dementia with dignity, because what you really want is companions, who understand that you’re going to lose the ability to go.

[00:33:45] Find what makes your heart sing? What makes your eyes happy? What you like to do? You’re going to lose the ability to find beauty for yourself. And you’re going to lose the ability to use language the way you always could. But if your companions understand what you’re losing and what, you’re not losing them, they can pick it up for you.

[00:34:08] That’s the most important thing is saying to your loved ones. I am not going crazy. I am losing various specific skills. I’ll do it in my own way, in my own pattern, but it’s going to be like this. And I would like you to join me on the journey. And when I can’t remember your name anymore, you just come sit down beside me, hold my hand and tell me all about us.

[00:34:31] Exactly. Share our memories with me. Cause you still got memory. Even if I don’t, you can help me. So I have one, one principle, I call know, be the story, tell her when somebody stares telling you stories over and over and over again, that’s because those stories are important to them. So you memorize them.

[00:34:54] And I did this with as many of my clients as I could, and I would memorize their memories and their stories using their words. And then when they forgot, when they couldn’t recall them anymore, I could sit down and I could say, Hey, Mary, you know who I am. I’m Judy, you know who you are. You’re married and we are great friends.

[00:35:14] We have known each other for nine years and we love each other. Oh, we have had fun. Let me tell you about the fun we have had just be the storyteller, be the memory keeper.

Hanh Brown: [00:35:26] That’s beautiful. I never thought of it like that, but then it’s so true. Wow. I’m so glad that we have this opportunity for you to share your wisdom and your journey in helping folks with dementia and also family caregivers.

[00:35:41] Thank you so much. Now, do you have anything else that you would like to add? How do people get a hold to you.

Judy Cornish: [00:35:46] So the Don method, it’s just the website, the Dawn method.com and Dawn is an acronym, dementia, and Alzheimer’s wellbeing network. Both of my books are on Amazon. Dot com if you Google dementia, they come right up or search under your name.

[00:36:15] But thank you so much, Hannah. It’s just been a joy to talk with you and to be able to share. Some of the things, you know, all of this, I learned all of this from people who were experiencing dementia.

[00:36:25] I didn’t go to school. I learned about law when I went to school and languages, but I learned about dementia from people who were experiencing dementia. I just had to learn how to write books, learn how to speak, to share their muscle.

Hanh Brown: [00:36:39] And you’ve done it beautifully. I love it. I just commend you for. Your heart and your dedication and making an impact.

Judy Cornish: [00:36:46] Thanks so much. Thank you.

Hanh Brown: [00:36:48] Have a great day.

Judy Cornish: [00:36:49] Bye bye-bye.

You can reach Judy on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/judycornish/
Visit her website: the DAWN Method: https://thedawnmethod.com/