Morning everybody-
This is Karen I posted a few weeks ago about trying to get my dad to accept caregivers. You all offered some great advice but we battle daily with his not wanting them here. He is still very lucid much of the time and trying to avoid arguing with him is so difficult.

I wanted to ask you folks how you handle the stress of dealing with all this. I've been reading past threads and so many of you have dealt with so much how do you stay sane? I am throwing up every day and it feels like a giant rodent is living in my stomach gnawing on me.

I have two sisters close by and we are working together but I have always hated conflict and dealing with dad's hatred of having caregivers here (only 17 hours a week ) is worst part for me. (Have great day center in town but he wants nothing to do with it. Big sigh)

I'm 42, single with no kidlets and have lived at my dad's since my mom died several years ago. I'm just having a bad day sorry to sound so whiny. We're off to the oncologist's office my dad was treated for lung cancer this year and we have follow ups. That disease he seems to be beating.
Thanks for listening-K

Dear Karen,

you are not sounding whiny! You are sounding exactly as I felt during the time I lived with Mom. It also made me physically sick.

I had high blood pressure (now entriely gone), acid reflux (now well under control), heart palpitaions (gone) , insomnia (almost gone) and a chronic headache(disappeared at once when I began to sleep again!)

The only thing that kept me half sane was that I had to go out to work every day. During that time Mom was mostly with an aide (she hated them and never accepted it but at least she was safe, except for the 3 hours not covred) ... but I was on duty every day from 3 PM to 6 AM the next day, often without sleep because she wandered around at night. And all weekends and all holidays.

The answer for me was that my brother agreed to take her in and let me go. It was such a relief, yet I almost said no. All the kind people on this Board helped me to see the light and say why not? I felt I 'couldn't do this to him!' But he and his wife volunteered. And I finally accepted after feeling very guilty about it, since I had promised to stay with her as long as she lived. But the Mom I promised that to was no longer around, it was a shadow of her old self, with impossible symptoms, unreasonable, uncooperative, etc.

As it turned out she was only there for 3 months and then broke a hip and wound up in a nursing home.

One thng that helped was that he would take her home with him for a weekend, or a day. I relished those few hours of freedom. And my job was very demanding (pre K teacher) so I had little time to worry about her during the hours at work.

The answer is getting your Dad into a type of place where 3 shifts of professional helpers care for him around the clock, whether he likes the idea or not. That is the only way you can get your own good health back. It is a hard decison and it took me a year before I could agree to let her go .. but when I saw how imposssible it was, I had to!

Good luck with it!

Love,

Martha