Mom & Me Five Archive

...and either think it's no big deal or don't think about it much, to ponder:
    I've recently struck up a friendly acquaintance with a woman who is, among handling other family challenges, caring in-home for her elderly mother (who has cancer), and her husband (who has a variety of escalating health problems that have led to clear disability).
    What you need to know about this woman: Prior to finding it necessary to become an avocational in-home caregiver, she was a professional nurse. She spent many years working in hospitals, live-in facilities, in private duty and in hospice. She is highly skilled, extensively experienced and loves her vocational work. She is the kind of professional health care worker you'd want handling your own relatives if they ever needed professional intense needs care.
    Her current situation: Despite a sterling professional resume, she is clearly overwhelmed by in-home caregiving, for a variety of reasons, all of which are well known to all avocational caregivers:

• Her extended family is as recalcitrant when it comes to helping and relieving her as are most caregivers' families;
• She is intimately familiar with, and can confirm, what most of us avocational caregivers suspect and/or have experienced: You can almost never rely on professionals to do more than a somewhat less than adequate to completely inadequate job of covering for you, thus she is reluctant to hire anyone to take her place. The professional caregiving landscape is, according to her, littered with those who don't, well, care very much, or very well;
• Those for whom she cares are incapable of understanding the breadth and depth of what she does for them;
• The members of her extended family network (most of whom live close to her) refuse to familiarize themselves with what she does for those of their shared relatives who require intense needs care even enough to understand it, let alone pitch in, thus, when they visit, which is rare, they are more of a burden than a refreshment or delight.

    She is, at this time, going through an entrenched period of caregiver burnout. She describes herself as a once easy-going, live-and-let-live kind of person who could deal with anything. This still comes through in our mutual correspondence, but she is also, now, clearly desperate and beside herself. She is displeased (to say the least) with what she senses she's becoming as a result of pursuing in-home, intense needs caregiving and fears for her future self. She continues, here and there, to gratefully experience extended moments of deep joy, inspiration and exhilaration through her in-home, intense needs caregiving, but she is more often so inundated that she continually wonders if and when she will fall into the deep end.
    I'm going to take a moment to spell out the point of this post: This woman is highly professionally skilled and experienced in the type of care many of us have found ourselves offering avocationally; not only this, she was a superior professional caregiver. She loved giving care when she was a professional. It was her calling. If her in-home care recipients disappeared today she would probably go right back to her former career and find as much satisfaction in it as before. She was able to remain grounded, familiar with and pleased with herself throughout her long career. She is now doing it avocationally and is finding that in the home environment exactly the same skills, experience and demands in which she reveled are ripping her apart, changing her in ways which confuse and try her.
    People, how many times do we caregivers have to shout this before the rest of you get it???? In-home, intense needs caregiving is extremely demanding. It requires a level of dedication and devotion, emotionally, intellectually, physically, socially and psychically, that can undo even the pros. Why do you suppose this is true? I can tell you: We live in a society that, for the most part, is extremely caregiver unfriendly...so caregiver unfriendly that it's hard to find pros like my friend; so unfriendly that the best advice caregiver advisers can offer us is akin to no advice at all: Hire someone to cover for you so you can take a break, regardless of the very real possibility that when you return from your break, you'll have to work double time to clean up the mess your hired help created.
    Shaking head, closing eyes, humming to myself..."when will we ever learn, when will we ever learn..."
    Later.