About Maria

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Starting Out…

The path toward what I do now wasn’t linear and I didn’t always know that older adults and their families would be part of it.  In fact, I hadn’t even thought about a career in Aging until a flier caught my eye toward the end of my first year at Columbia University School of Social Work.

Prior to that I had been interning at an outpatient substance abuse clinic where I saw adolescents for individual counseling.  I liked what I was doing and at the ripe old age of 22, liking what I did for a living was enough. I wholeheartedly expected to pursue a career assisting teens after graduation.

But then I saw the flier.

It probably shouldn’t have stood out to me at all in the sea of overlapping paper on that bulletin board.  And as blissfully in “like” with the idea of adolescent social work as I was at the time, the hair on my arms that seemed to stand up more as I read was downright confusing.

After thinking it through I decided that a feeling like that was too strong to ignore, so I did the thing that made imperfect sense and applied.  A few months later I was awarded one of five student fellowships from The New York Academy of Medicine and enrolled in the first-of-its-kind program that would prepare me for a career assisting older adults.1

For the next year I would have one of the most unique and formative experiences of my professional life.  During the fall semester I became, by all accounts, a medical social worker at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.  There, I was responsible for assessing and discharged older adults from the orthopedic, oncology and emergency departments.

But it was the experiences I’d have in the second half of the year that would take my learning to another level.  Then, as part of the fellowship, I would get the chance to make home visits to the patients I had personally discharged.

Far from the linoleum floors and fluorescent lights of the hospital, I was able to meet my patients in a new way.  First, they became clients to me.  And without the need for transportation or bathroom equipment to divert us, their stories emerged.  Some had cognitive impairment and felt their grip on independence slipping.  Others were frail but still managing with delivered meals and despite fits of loneliness.  All made an indelible mark on me.

As graduation approached I wanted more of what I’d just had but couldn’t find it.  Frustrated, I decided to open myself up to different experiences.

In the next few years I would provide supportive counseling to the spouses of those lost on 9/11 and work once more with teens – this time in a group home setting in the suburbs of San Francisco.  In each of these instances there was no roadmap for how to be of help; I had to rely on my ability to connect with my clients and on my instincts for what to say and do thereafter.  I didn’t feel it at the time, but in retrospect I think I was preparing for something else.

The San Francisco Years…

Four years later, an opportunity presented itself that felt as right to me as applying for the fellowship program had, and I grabbed it.  I was now the only social worker assigned to patients 60 and older with complex, chronic medical conditions - the setting was the outpatient medical clinic at Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco.

For the next three years I would work side-by-side with nurses and physicians toward the goal of enhancing quality of life for my patients.  Referrals would come from every direction and each one would require something different.

In response, I performed Mini-Mental Status Exams, rounded with oncologists in the hospital after the delivery of devastating news, and advocated my tail off for those who were dangerously close to slipping through the cracks.  My efforts were beginning to garner respect among a large interdisciplinary team and soon my phone, which only rang occasionally in the beginning, never stopped ringing.

I had been hired to assist older adults and I was certainly doing that.  But in the process I began to take notice of the needs of another group of people equally as important – family caregivers. I wanted to find ways to respond to them that would be meaningful.

Beyond providing brochures and basic answers to important questions, I began gathering families into my office to discuss what Alzheimer’s disease would mean for them.  Before long, physicians began inviting me into their exam rooms to “continue the conversation” about palliative care or hospice with overwhelmed spouses and adult children.  This led to my co-leading several support groups and a steady stream of requests for brief consultations from all over.

In his book, The Element, Ken Robinson, PhD, talks about finding the intersection between what you’re good at and what you love to do.  Without question, I found my “Element” on the floors of that medical clinic on Geary Blvd.  Staying late or arriving early was never a problem for me because time, as Dr. Robinson describes, just moved differently.  I was soaking it in and learning all I could.

Back to Home Base…

In 2007, my husband and I made the bittersweet decision to return to the East Coast to be closer to our own families.  Once again I’d had an experience that I wanted to continue although I wasn’t sure how.  As I started the job hunt I also started writing down what I had learned – material that would later become the basis for this website.

Within a few months I was hired by a federally funded program to provide supportive services to family caregivers of older adults.  Shortly thereafter, I was promoted to Director.  I still hold this position today and enjoy the work tremendously despite the constant cloud of uncertainty about funding that hangs above.

In my spare time I write all I can about a host of topics related to elder care and cross my fingers that my thoughts will reach people for whom they’ll be useful.

Oh, and I’m working on a PhD in Computer Technology.  Okay, not really. But starting a website from scratch sure makes it feel that way .

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