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You wake up with a thousand things to check off the list. Between yourself and the person you care for, it’s a 36-Hour Day.
Get ready for some caregiver infotainment (entertaining information or informative entertainment). With this hilariously demented checklist of responsibilities you’ll grow to resent, you might find a moment that makes you smile.
The tip of the iceberg. With medication monitoring routine for multiple prescriptions at multiple times of the day. Pills are the nice part. Aging comes with general decline of health, not just dementia. You’ll need to not only remember but also muster up the motivation to change wet underpants, clean infections, and other icky chores.
Caregivers can help their carereceivers maintain higher levels of independence by enforcing routine schedules. Eating at the same time every day keeps the digestive gears turning. Exercising is the game changer my dad has never been willing to continue regularly. Social interaction and calling people to jog the memory maintain ties into old age. Do what you can to get away from the TV once every day.
Arguably, cooking is a separate task than housekeeping, and housekeeping is a separate task than cooking. With dementia, you can expect daily messes to clean up beyond the average after-meal dishes. Yesterday alone, my dad spread red Jello Jigglers on the floor and dropped a full roll of toilet paper down in the toilet bowl. It’s so frustrating because I can’t remember the last time my dad did anything for a Klondike bar. Today it feels like all give and no take.
Call it fall-proofing or wandering prevention, it’s your responsibility to prevent the person with dementia from hurting themselves. In my home, we keep knives and scissors hidden away and lock the doors at night. They call me “The Caretaker” because I provide care by taking away the dangerous household objects.
In the later years, showering becomes many caregivers’ least-favorite part of the day. At least with my dad, combative behavior comes out most when he’s feeling vulnerable. He feels vulnerable when he’s naked and told what to do by the person showering him.
My and my dad spend quality time together when he’s not being so needy. It sucks I devote so much of my time where I’m more or less a puppet to my dad. Could be me, my wife, or my mom - all my dad care is that someone tips up his sippy cup.
Society’s got to learn something about caregiver burnout. It doesn’t happen just once in a caregiver’s journey. It’s a cycle of reaching burnout, recovering from burnout, and repeat. Dementia caregiver burnout likely happens at higher frequency or greater extremes. You’ll pay yourself a future favor if you find someone trustworthy to take care of your family member with dementia for a full day or one night. Seriously, one person’s Parkinson's and dementia is almost too much to bear for an adult family of four living under one household.
Sure my dad’s got Parkinson’s, but it's the dementia that makes it extra hard for him to figure out how to get around. My dad and me call it bumping up. I’m thinking about a Joe Budden “Bump Me Up (REMIX)” for people living with Parkinson’s and Dementia mixed. Shorty!
Both behind-the-scenes agenda planning and the public-facing days when you get out of the house. Heavy doctors visits and light errands alike require drastically more effort when living with dementia.
We’re putting self care last, just like many caregivers do for themselves. Dementia caregiving is especially energy draining. You must self-care your energy up faster than the other-care drains your energy down.
