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Caregiving For Dementia


Apr 9, 2018

In your teenage years, you don’t always see eye to eye with your parents about your friends. A lot of the time you end up in a big argument with your parents over your friends, because your parents can see things down the road that you can’t. These arguments are especially harsh, when argument is over a boyfriend, girlfriend relationship.

            When it dawns on you that mom and dad knew what they were talking about, you are like wow, mom and dad did know what they were talking about. You realize mom and dad’s all this coming.

            Years go by and you’re set in your lifestyle. You have your wife and kids. You even have a good career plan and your parents are getting older and a lot of the times, At this stage in life. Your parents can no longer stay by themselves. A lot of the times you don’t have the time for your parents that they need due to your job and family obligations. In this stage of the game you start looking for adult day care centers, nursing homes, and that kind of thing. These kinds of places, However, are quite expensive.

When I think of nursing homes I think of it placed you really don’t want to be. You think most of them are dark, scrounging, dirty places. Now let me be clear. It has never been our intention to just drop mom off in a nursing home. We not even honestly considering this.

            There comes a point in life where you lose all control of everything that you do. The last little bit of control that you have is whether or not you shower/bath, take your medication when you need to. This seems to be the last little bit of control, Mama seems to have, and at times both situations end up into being small arguments.

            I named this episode, feeling like a bad caregiver, son because mom is 85. And when we get into small arguments about medication and showering, she gets a little hyper for lack of a better explanation. And I get the feeling like the bad guy because it takes so much about overall she wants to do is sleep afterward and I know that a lot of heart attacks happen, you 1st get up. Therefore, I start feeling like the bad caregiver, the bad, son because I get to thinking about these heart attack when the person that your taking care of 1st wakes up. The only thing I can think to do when Mama gets all shook up is just tell her I love her, give her a kiss tell her I love her just let them know that they are loved. You did as a child and now that you’re in your 60s 70s and 80s, they need to know that you still need him still love them.

 There are times where I don’t think Mama knows a whole lot. But then there are times when she knows everything that’s going on. The times that she knows what’s going on around her are the times that we need to love on her. The nursing arms are going to do that. The nursing homes on even a dope him up and stick them in a room somewhere where they're spending 95% of the time by themselves. That’s one reason why we’re not even considering a nursing home option. I plan on keeping mom with us, just as long as we possibly can hope that she understands that we love her that we care for and I hope that she never forgets that.

I want to send a big thank you to Miranda Jankowska from the UK for the grade email this week to let me know that this podcast is not following on dead ears. She’s let me know that there are listeners out there and I dislike the thinker so very much for the nice email. Thanks for listening thanks Miranda, thanks to all.