This seems to be a question that is not asked enough or we think what we are feeling is not as important as what our loved one is going through. This job we have taken on is a tough one and there are days when I think my "stress rope" cannot be pulled any tighter. Then there are other times that make those bad days just a memory. Do you feel like banging your head against a wall one day? And then the next day your loved one is attentive and loving and comprehends whatever you say? There are some who keep those feelings bottled up within themselves; others take the time for outside resources and others who look at sites such as this for some understanding. I do better when I have someone else to bounce my feelings off of. Let's face it....we aren't superhuman and besides ourselves and perhaps a family to take care of we now have taken on the responsibility of another human who is incapable of taking care of themselves. Do you breeze through the care giving without a problem? If so, I would like to know how you do it, maybe you can offer some new ideas; do you have feelings of frustration and need to talk about those? Come and talk and know that you can speak freely and without judgement and without finger pointing.
I am caring for my mother-in-law and have been for about 1 1/2 years. She has moderate dementia and incontinence. Other than that she is very healthy. Sometimes that short amount of time feels like 10 years and I wonder how long I will be able to do this job. I get so very tired of hearing the same thing day in and day out, but I have to remind myself that to her, each time she sees me, she is offering new information. At times I have no problems communicating with her, but it seems like more and more she cannot retain a thought longer than 5 minutes. We have had to make signs for her so she will know what she can and cannot do. So far it's working, but for how long? Maybe I will have to end up making her a "Book of Do Nots". She is on memory drugs, which don't seem to make a difference. So why do I continue to dole them out to her? I guess I'm afraid of what might happen or how she might act without them. I might have to rent a boat or buy a helmet! Sometimes I see something in her that leads me to believe that she could get aggressive and what would be my reaction to that? At the end of each and every day, after she is tucked into bed, I breathe such a sigh of relief. The "inner beast" is quiet at last, or at least for a few hours.
Pull up a chair and visit........I would like to know how you are coping everyday..be it good or with handfuls of stress.
What to do to improve things for you...? You could take supplements aimed at those with low immune issues. Emergen-C comes to mind. You could try one every day for 2 weeks and see how you feel...? Can you tolerate a bit of lemon juice? I put lemon or lime juice in my glasses of water throughout the day. I've managed (so far) to be around a bunch of sick people at work and I haven't come down with anything, which is pretty amazing for me as I used to get anything/everything, it seemed.
I still have plenty of issues with my health, too, but a little SSRI, plus diet changes, plus certain supplements, and getting rid of my major stress source seems to have helped much.
I just want you to be well and feel ok. I know what it's like to struggle with different things and just being generally "unwell" much of the time. You're in an in-between place where you're not acutely ill enough to get treatment, but you're constantly being run down by little things. Please take care of yourself!!! :-)
In Indiana (and I'm sure all over the U.S. and everywhere), there are these old cemeteries that seem to be forgotten completely. Just a patch of a few hundred sq ft off to the side of some rural road, with old crumbly headstones, and you wouldn't even know it was a cemetery there unless you stopped and were looking for it.
Yeah. I like exploring cemeteries, too. Lol.
And I think Windy's right: your activities of sitting over a desk at work, hovering over your dad at home, that's probably what is leading to your rolled shoulders, I would think. Do you have health coverage that would let you get a bone scan just to make sure?
I know that when I am stressed out a lot (and often don't even realize it) I have a really hard time swallowing. I've had that for years and my dad had the same problem. It comes and goes and I just tell myself it will eventually pass. It always does sooner or later. It's anxiety for me. Everything in my body tenses up. It stinks.
Could the stress have your body in knots too? Osteoporosis takes a long time to show its' effects in most people. You are too young for that.
Turning and changing your dad is probably affecting your back and neck. It's part of your routine, I know, but the repetitive stress on your body can be wearing. You are used to going through the daily motions of his care. It's not doing you any favors though. It's wearing out your body when you should be maintaining your own back and joints for your own old age.
Easier said than done, I know.
((Hugs))
My mom has seemed to reach a plateau. How she hangs on, I don't know. Hubs and I are taking her out for lunch tomorrow. At 79 pounds and no strength it is incredible. She still wants to get out for awhile.
Tonight, as I was changing his pamper, I gasped in pain. He asked what's wrong. My upper shoulder is hurting. He said, "Your head hurts, your neck hurts, you choking on the food and now your shoulder. What did the doctor say about the choking?" ... I strongly suspect my upper shoulders are hurting because my bones are changing. I can see my upper shoulders is starting to curve. When I lie completely flat, it's so painful to feel my back and shoulders stretching. Osteoporosis?
I asked her, "Are you saying that I HAVE to see only my doctor? That I cannot see another doctor who's available in the afternoon?"
She replied after a pause, "It's recommended that you see your regular doctor." ... silence.... silence ....
I replied in frustration, "It's okay! Never mind! Forget it. Bye."
Ugh!!! Tomorrow, if I remember, I will call my previous doctor from a previous clinic. THEY have no problem fitting ME into MY available date - even if it's to see another physician that is not my regular doctor. {I just hate the clinic's location - traffic gets bad around 3pm.}
Do you think you could get SO to take a scrubbing brush to some of these old headstones. We had some on our last property a family including a young girl. Our pediatrician said a lot of people died from measles in those days.
Yet I feel so bad for the other parts of the US with soooo much snow, soooo much rain, and early tornado season.
I took a much need walk the other day. It was at a small local cemetery. I know, it is probably the last place someone would want to walk, but I found the very old headstones so very interesting to read, such as the four sided stones had family history. When you see a young wife who passed at 18, makes you wonder what happened back in 1899, did she pass from a illness, from childbirth, or some type of accident?
Sad were the stone that had so much moss on the north side you couldn't read anything on the stone. My sig other is employed at this cemetery, it's his retirement job after a long dual career. I am thinking it would be interesting to restore those very old headstones :)
Now I'm getting a little melancholy. Most of the people there today visit my FIL quite regularly. With my brother gone now, it's down to just me and hubs (occasionally our son), but mostly me. I'm a bit jealous of all the support. Mom has no other relatives here and no friends. They were all left behind in another state when she moved here with me. It stinks being the only visitor and responsible for everything. Hopefully, my attitude will improve tomorrow when I get back into the swing of our regular routine. There are lots of really friendly and helpful people at her AL that have become friends of mine. Mom enjoys most of them too. She just won't make friends with people her own age. :(
She sounded pretty good on the phone today, though it's getting more difficult for her to hold the phone. Don't know what I will do when that ability goes away. I'm just taking it one day at a time.
Thanks for asking Book. You are a thoughtful person and I appreciate you. :)
Windy, how's it in the homefront? How are you holding up?
As for the land, fave sis visited. She's so frustrated with it. She wanted to build on it but couldn't. So, her and hubby bought a house/land. She's at the point where she prefers to just sell it and pay off her current mortgage.... Sis is a shop-a-holic. She would go through that money like nothing in no time. I told her that I hate to die and my portion of the land enlarges everyone's else portion. I would rather sell it now and enjoy the money. Than to die and it goes to them. By the way, I heard that my dad was only going to gift that big land to my 3 brothers. Mom had thrown a fit and he ended up including us 5 girls. Yay, mom!
Later.... it's getting later and later. I need to snack before it gets too late and my acid reflux worsens. My last meal was at 3:30pm. I'm still not hungry. But I need to eat something because I know that in the middle of the night, my stomach would start hurting like crazy....
It is there on the maps because it is your legal right to use it. Have you ever had title work done on the property? What you learn may be interesting.
If he is that controlling, he should be POA. This whole thing ticks me off. YOU should be the landowner. You have saved them A MILLION DOLLARS in personal care over 20 plus years. Probably more than that.
Put your foot down sister. Get a lawyer. I don't care what your brother "claims". He is an ass. You deserve to be paid for decades of caregiving.
I'm so behind in doing dad's books. I just realized how far behind I am in reconciling all his accounts/expenses. Some of those lousy receipts-that-fade have faded. And these receipts from last year! I tried going online for our power bill account and ..can you believe that they don't offer history to previous bills?!
Dad's still coughing hard. At nights now, he's snoring. He didn't snore before. I've also noticed that he seems to choke when drinking his nutrient drink. But has no problem with the eggs. And yes, he's still saying no about going to the clinic. The 'quacks are going to kill him.'
Well, I went to land management to get a copy of the land tax bills. They call you inside the inner offices, seat on their left, and you can see the computer screen when they use it. I gave him our land tax from 2 years ago.
I'm not a numbers person. You tell me something is 3 yards away. I'm still trying to figure out how many rulers fit into 1 yard. You tell me that the bag is 3 feet, I automatically think 3 rulers - one on top of the other. If you tell me that the height is 6 feet, I automatically think my height of just under 5 feet + 1 ruler. One time, my brother told me how much each of us 8 siblings would get from our not subdivided gifted land from dad. I gave him a blank look. So he said it's like the size of 1-1/2 football field. (in my head, I was trying to figure out how big is a football field since I don't even go to sports games at all.) ....
Anyway, the land agent looks at the old bill, gasped and said in wonder, "29,001.00 sq mtrs!" I gave him a blank look. He turned to his computer, typed in our land number, and it popped up. Oh my!!! There is this huge mass of land, surrounded by teeny tiny small division lands (private homeowners and their land boundaries.) Oh my gosh!!! Our land is huge! I said, Wow! He turned to look at me. I'm still staring at the computer. That is sooooo big when you see the small lands around it.... Ha! I told him it's useless. Try subdividing it into 8 slots and everyone wants the best land. No one wanted to sign it unless they got the top. He stared at me and said, "Landlocked." He told me that this has happened before, and they had to go to court and it was done by drawing. Cost the family close to $45,000.00 to go this route. All that prime land and we cannot even touch it, build on it, etc... He kept muttering under his breath and shaking his head, "landlocked."
Not as bad as my husband's family, though. When he and his brothers get together, there is inevitably a " who can drink a glass of chocolate milk the fastest" content. Oy.
I think stuff like this is why I keep working. Getting kids with autism into proper education programs somehow seems more important. Keeps me from dwelling on family inequality.
Many years ago, my dad was diagnosed with Chronic Leukemia. It was 15 years of ups and downs. His docs always said that something else would kill him, not the leukemia. To tell you the end first, yes, Kidney failure got him in the end.
About 10 years into his diagnosis, just after I'd gone back to work, having been home with my kiddles for 5 years and then grad school, my mom called, beside herself. My dad had been diagnosed with a fungal infection of his sinuses, and his doctors said that this would likely be fatal and there was no treatment.
I sat down at work and thought about what to do. I called my kid's pediatrician, who was the most thoughtful and useful doctor I knew at the time. I told him the name of the thing that my dad had been dxed with and he said quickly, "oh, I'm SO sorry". So I asked, what would you do if this was your parent? He thought for a moment and asked where my dad had been diagnosed and who was treating him. He had been first seen at Sloan Kettering, but his ongoing treatment was being handled in Westchester. Dr. A was silent for a moment and said, "call his doc at Sloan; find out if they are doing a clinical trial".
I called the oncologist who had first seen dad; he was quite interested to hear what was going on and asked all sorts of questions about his treatment. Then he said "can you get me slides of what they are seeing in his sinus?" I said I would get them to him and got the info about where to have them brought. I called my brother (who lived closest to my parents) and told him what was needed. he called Dad's doc and had the slides prepared and drove them to NY to Sloan. They got him into a clinical trial and cleared up the infection.
The punchline is that my mother, to this day, refers to this as "the time your brother saved Daddy's life". You really can't change the perspective of a person who is determined to glorify one child over another. It hurts, yes, but it's as old as the stories in Genesis.