Making it up as I go along

Last night I wrote a whole post on how dementia care giving is like improv, and then it didn't feel right and I deleted it and started over.

Tonight I attended a class on caregiver stress, and the instructor talked about how it is like improv too. Perhaps I was just getting ahead of myself.

Possibly the most important thing said was a reminder that the patient can't change, so you have to. The sense in which that was said was true.

In a different sense, they change all the time. It's been quite a while now that our mother has not believed this is her house, or that there is not another set of her youngest, and that any of the different cats that she sees here belongs to her, though she does believe she has a cat and she worries about it. However, just today she asked about the dog, and said Adele wasn't her dog. One of the few assurances we have been able to give her has been showing her the dog so she can see that the dog is fine. Twice today she got confused about that. We were able to talk her down, but that will probably only get harder.

We will have to adjust. That will involve coming up with multiple responses, and figuring out which one is best at any given time. Sometimes you say something that has worked before, and then it just doesn't. That's when you need to change; saying the same thing louder will not force it to work.

A lot of the information on dementia was familiar; I have been at this for a while and I study hard.

It was also really about the stress the caregiver has, not the dementia itself.

They did an early scene (scripted, not improvised), where after having to repeat the same information multiple times the caregiver yelled at her mother, and the anger felt real. It was a little scary.

(I am relatively good at repeating the same thing multiple times.)

What was more applicable was the part about building teams of support - which I have not done - and the much higher percentage of hospitalizations for caregivers who were not in support groups.

Fun story: I know of a support group that meets nearby, but they meet at 10AM on Wednesdays. What caregiver has weekday mornings free? I can only assume it's to keep the attendance manageable. Or a sick joke.

And I don't want to end up in the hospital.

Recently I have felt illness coming on and been able to head it off, but then I got this image of me after all of this is over just throwing up everything in my body and being hospitalized with dehydration and wildly out of control blood sugar.

Delving into that image, it felt like it could signal that if I just kept stuffing all emotions - grief, fear, anger, stress, and everything else - down to keep myself functioning, then there could be a terrible recoil when taking care of my mother ends.

I can't rule out a physical somatic response, but that could all be metaphorical. I could just end up a raging crying mess too. There are a lot of possibilities for what reactions can happen, and what will happen between now and then. Don't take anything too literally, is what I am saying here.

My conclusion was that I needed to make sure that I was letting off steam and getting things out on a regular basis; that build up would not be healthy, regardless. Shortly after that I blew up at my sisters, which was totally not how I saw that going, and not a permanent solution anyway.

What I am saying here is that there are things to work on, and I continue to study.

I don't know if I will be writing about that next week, but I am thinking of it.