A Path to Emotional Support for Caregivers
Caregivers suffer disproportionately from depression, anxiety and loneliness, but each caregiver can take one step that will help combat all three: finding a support group.
Getting Support: The Challenges Caregivers Face and How to Overcome Them
When people becomes parents for the first time, they encounter a new world with demands and stresses and joys that they never anticipated.
How to Find Help– Tips for Caregivers and Loved Ones
Strangely enough, when someone suffers from a stroke or other debilitating ailment, at least two people end up needing help—the sufferer and the caregiver.
Entering the Medical World As a Caregiver
When you are suddenly thrust into life as a caregiver, handling a loved one’s medical needs can be one of the most confusing things for you to manage.
Unless you have a medical background, you’ll be learning all sorts of new vocabulary and medical processes. You may be interacting with multiple doctors about varied medications and treatments, all of which you need to oversee. You may need to perform a litany of tasks at home, ranging from administering injections to monitoring blood oxygen levels, while also assisting with baths and other cleanliness tasks.
What to Do When the End Is Near
One of the most heart-wrenching aspects of being a caregiver is deciding how to let go of your loved one.
When is the right time to move a patient into hospice, which can provide loving and professional support while someone is dying? When would residential placement be helpful, or would dying at home be preferable? Could palliative care, which helps with pain management, be of use? How do you approach making certain the will and any other legal issues are properly addressed? Should preparations be made in advance for a funeral?
How to Build a Caregiver Support System
When suddenly thrust into life as a caregiver, one needs support—financial, social, emotional, and physical—but how and where do you find it?
The answer to that will be unique for every person and each situation. Some people might have big families or an extensive group of supportive friends who jump in to help out, but most will not have this ideal situation.
Financial Tips for New Caregivers
When one suddenly becomes a caregiver, the challenges can be immense and confusing.Aside from the varied emotional and medical stresses, caregivers must deal with sudden and unexpected financial changes.
When Janet Dodson, a Kathi Koll Foundation award recipient, lost her mother, Dodson and her stepsister became the caretakers for Dodson’s stepfather, who has Parkinson’s disease. Aside from the family’s grief, the financial and legal stresses were immense as the sisters worked to understand the many aspects of not just his medical and physical care, but the requisite legal and banking adjustments and varied costs.
Keeping Intimacy Alive
Keeping intimacy alive is a challenge in any relationship, but when one partner has had a stroke, the challenges can multiply.
Strangely enough, after my husband had a massive stroke that left him paralyzed from the neck down, our love for each other grew stronger. This may seem odd since our relationship and our lives also were tested in ways I could never have imagined.
New Year’s Resolution For The Caregiver: Be Kinder To Yourself
It’s the New Year and that time that we start thinking about how we’re going to do things differently, and better, in the next year. Perhaps you’d like to shed those holiday pounds by going to the gym every day, take a new class or read more. The New Year is a good time to make a change or at least think about making a change.
Enjoying the Holidays After a Stroke
After my husband suffered a catastrophic stroke in 2005, the holidays didn’t seem so merry.
I found myself yearning for our life before Don became paralyzed from the neck down and had to use a respirator to breathe. Everything about the holiday season seemed to emphasize how our old life was gone and how our present reality was nothing either of us had wanted.