I was hugely uncomfortable, a week overdue with my first child.  Almost everybody sensed that this was a delicate time in my life, one requiring sensitivity and support.  Everyone except my grandparents, who were calling hourly with assorted problems, demanding to know when my mother could come back and tend to their needs properly again.

I practiced hypno-birthing techniques, attempting to lower my stress level while my mother held the phone a foot away from her ear.  Grandma Geraldine’s shrill voice pierced the air.  “Why can’t you come back now?  You know, that lovely girl on the news had a Cesarean Section and didn’t inconvenience anyone’s schedule.  You’ve been gone a week and we need you!  How much longer is it going to be?”

My mother just sighed and tried to explain that she would be there as soon as her first grandbaby was safely “on the ground.”  As their primary caregiver, she was clear they weren’t having  any actual emergencies.  Unless you count running out of Grandpa’s favorite cookies or difficulties with setting the thermostat as life or death situations.

If you’re a caregiver, you know it’s tough enough to set boundaries and take care of yourself in the best of circumstances.  With a demanding and manipulative parent, it’s even harder.  When my mother and I realized that Grandpa Rene and Grandma Geraldine were guaranteed to have some kind of perceived emergency every time we were gone for more than a day, we were able to plan accordingly.  Here’s what helped:

• See behind childish behaviors. A sense of abandonment, loneliness and loss of control are often the root causes of manipulative behavior.  Recognizing what’s going on behind the scenes empowers us to find effective solutions.
• Set clear limits. Once we are clear on our own ecological boundaries, we are responsible for communicating them.  Maintaining consistent limits, despite initial resistance from loved ones, will ease everyone’s lives.
• Seek creative solutions. Enlist other people’s help in brainstorming and finding alternate ways of meeting your loved one’s eldercare needs.  This leads to  increased freedom in your life, a greater sense of trust and security in the minds of your elderly loved ones, and increased positive communication.

Are you a caregiver for manipulative parents? Do you have some tips to share with our EldercareABC community?  We’d love to read them as comments on this blog!

Therapy dogs (and their handlers!) are consistently calm, confident and well socialized.  Rather than merely tolerating new people, they are happy to be in social situations, and are specially trained to visit hospitals and assisted living facilities.  They bring benefits to everyone, and particularly to elderly people who can no longer care for their own dogs.

I was a bit surprised when I asked my mother about her top criteria for eldercare, and she replied that she must have access to dogs!  Clearly, she has a special fondness for these furry companions, but these four legged friends can bring these benefits to everyone:

• Calming presence.  We know that petting dogs consistently lowers our blood pressure and calms our heart rates.  If a person is angry, afraid or distressed, a therapy dog can be the best medicine.
• Pain relief.  Stroking dogs has been shown to release endorphins that have the potential to block pain!
• Morale booster. Therapy dogs can help patients let go of their problems for a while, make assisted living facilities feel more like home, and bring back happy memories.
• Eldercare appropriate social stimulation.  Therapy dogs and their handlers are attention grabbers in the moment, plus they offer something special to talk about later in the day.

PawsandHearts.org is one of many excellent organizations that devote themselves to bringing the healing benefits of therapy dogs to the elderly.  They point to a study of nursing homes in New York, Missouri and Texas with compelling results:  Medication costs dropped from an average of $3.80 per patient per day to $1.18 per patient per day when nursing homes allowed for pets to be introduced into patient’s environments. Wow!

Want more information?  Check out these excellent sources: therapydogsofsocal.org , deltasociety.org and tdi-dog.org.

If you have a therapy dog story or resource that can benefit our EldercareABC community, please share by commenting on this blog!

I winced.  The woman in the grocery store reached her breaking point as the elderly man in her care grabbed handfuls of gold wrapped chocolates and shoved them in his pocket.  Her words spilled out in a rush.  “Don’t you understand that you’re not allowed to have those?  They give you diarrhea, which I have to clean up!  And even if you could eat them, we have to pay for them!  You’re driving me crazy!”

While this was an uncomfortable moment, I don’t blame her at all.  I understand her frustration, having been closer than I’d like to admit to the edge of my patience on a number of occasions.  Perhaps you have, too.

The good news is that elderly charges suffering from dementia aren’t actually trying to drive their caregivers crazy.  They are simply functioning the best they can with rapidly diminishing mental resources.  Here are some strategies that help me keep my cool:

Revise expectations.

Let’s face it.  We are used to interacting with people who have their mental faculties solidly intact.  Cognitive changes in dementia require that we re-evaluate our expectations in light of the changing state of our loved ones.  Who they are now may be quite different than who they were six months ago.  If we understand that they can process very little outside of the immediate moment, we can reduce our stress levels (and often theirs) by communicating accordingly.

Choose your battles.

As caregivers, there will be thousands of times that we disagree with something our loved one wants to eat, wear or do.  Only a fraction of these will be truly relevant to their health and well being.  I don’t always succeed, but I find that everyone is happier when I limit confrontations to safety issues.

Reduce reasoning and explanations.

As mental processing skills decline, it becomes more difficult for people with dementia to think things through.  Abstract ideas like time may become irrelevant in their world.  Arguing becomes an exercise in futility as the target of our carefully crafted arguments are not likely to “see the light” and come around to our way of thinking!  Offering fewer explanations and choices around essential daily activities decreases everyone’s frustration.

Do you have a strategy for coping more gracefully with loved ones living in the “ever-present now?” Please share with our caregiver community by commenting on this blog!

“Shhhh!”  My Grandma June looked at me fiercely, finger to her lips, ordering me to quiet my little ones.  She seemed to think there was just too much noise and general liveliness going on at her assisted living facility that day.  Never mind that televisions from adjoining rooms were creating a great deal more noise than my (reasonably) well behaved children, or that at least thirty smiles beamed at us as we walked through the eating area to Grandma’s room.  So I shushed them a little bit, reminding them that Grandma was extra cranky that day, but I smiled to myself on the inside.  I mean, what’s not to like about really cute kids full of life energy?

Granted, not everyone loves kids.  And I completely understand that someone in a great deal of pain is not likely to want kids playing right next to (or on) them.  Boundaries are important, and I always teach my children to respect people’s wishes.  However, I witness the most joyful smiles and youthful transformations from elderly residents when I bring my children in to visit.

Grandma June passed away two years ago, but I still bring my girls to visit residents at assisted living facilities and nursing homes.  Sometimes I go as part of a belly dancing troupe to spread some infectious music and share a little dance therapy.  But sometimes we just go to say hello and breathe some vital life energy into these “homes away from home.”

Some of my earlier writing cites clinical evidence about the healing role that pet therapy and music therapy plays in the lives of the elderly.  Unfortunately, I can’t yet make a scientific claim about my theory that children are quite therapeutic in the lives of the elderly.  That said, I do know what my heart feels and my eyes see when the very young and very old are brought together.  Everyone benefits.  The children and the elderly have a wonderful time talking, laughing and working on crafts together.

Activity director Mindy Bench in Cottage Grove, OR created an inter-generational day camp known as Camp Grandma based on her desire to bring these mutually beneficial age groups together.  It is a delightful experience for both young and old, one I would love to see replicated in assisted living facilities around the country.

What are your experiences with young children and the elderly? Do you know of any inter-generational day camps at assisted living facilities that you would like to share with our EldercareABC community?  I look forward to reading your thoughts as comments on this blog.

I had a bad habit of turning down offers of help while caring for my elderly grandfather in my home.  I clearly remember people offering to come and sit with him so I could have a little time away, but I somehow felt it was inappropriate for me to accept their offers.  For one thing, I  didn’t want to burden anyone else with “my” responsibility.  And if I am really honest with myself, I realize now that I wanted to be seen as a competent caregiver.  At that time, I couldn’t see myself as a capable, responsible person if I admitted my need for support.

I didn’t pay attention to the fact that I was short on sleep and low on proper nutrition, not to mention neglectful of my personal hygiene!  I was under the impression that the only “right” way was to handle things on my own, or at least within my immediate family.  Pretty soon, friends stopped offering to help.  I rarely got a chance to go out and visit any of them, and they seemed to assume that once my grandfather had settled in and I had “learned the ropes,” I didn’t need help anymore.  Apparently I proved myself so “competent” that they figured I could handle it unless I said otherwise.

Eventually, on the edge of caregiver burnout, I realized that asking for and allowing support into my life was one of the most responsible (and therefore competent!) things I could do.  This is a bit counter-intuitive, so consider this in your own life:

If you conserve your already taxed resources by accepting and encouraging some helpful hands, you will have more energy to go around.  This will naturally increase your ability to enjoy your elderly loved one, the rest of your family, your life, and help you feel more like yourself again.  You will feel more capable and able to respond to your loved one’s needs.  Therefore, accepting help equals happier, healthier, more competent you.

So I’m encouraging you to start becoming aware of what would make a difference in your life.  Please accept offers of assistance that come your way, and speak up and ask for additional help if you feel like you could use it.  In Gaining Essential Caregiver Support: Part Two, we’ll explore this idea further with some great ideas to empower your life.

Be sure to sign up for our email notification or bookmark our RSS Feed in your reader.

by Christy Cuellar-Wentz

After decades of enthusiastic greetings and powerful hugs in which my Grandmother  smushed my face into her bosom, I was shocked by the blank look on her face when I walked into her room.  I realized she had no idea who I was.  Worse, I could see that she didn’t remember my father, her son, either.  The pain on his face broke my heart.

This was one of my toughest eldercare moments.  Even though I knew she was forgetting more each day, I expected her to remember us forever.  I rarely cared that she forgot shared activities from earlier in the day, but I couldn’t bear to see her forget the people closest to her heart.

If I’m really honest with myself, I think I was scared that her memory loss was indicative of the quality of our relationship.  I thought that if we were just close enough, she would have no choice but to remember.  If you are a caregiver struggling with memory loss in your loved one, I offer these tips to help:

• Understand the disease. It wasn’t until I began researching the toll dementia was taking on my Grandmother’s brain that I was able to come to terms with the process.  I realized that she was losing the ability to recognize our faces because her brain could no longer remember things or put information together in a coherent way.  I suppose I am lucky she didn’t think I was an intruder that day.  Sites like HelpGuide.org and MayoClinic.com have excellent articles to increase our understanding of dementia.
• Let yourself off the hook. It doesn’t matter how close you were, or how good of a caregiver you are now.  Reassure yourself that their memory loss has nothing to do with the quality of your relationship.  At a certain point, the person’s brain just doesn’t make the proper connections anymore, and it’s not your fault!
• Talk it through.  My Dad and I talked for a long time about our shared experience with my Grandmother.  Mourning the loss of her memory brought us closer together.  Finding just one safe person to share your emotions with can give you the strength to carry on.

Are you a caregiver who has dealt with severe memory loss in a loved one?  I would love to read your story as a comment on this blog.

I’m an avid fan of brain improvement programs.  I originally sought brain development resources to rescue my own flagging mental fitness.  As a caregiver for my elderly grandfather and a homeschooling mother of two young children, I had a tendency to run myself ragged.  Continually focusing on other people’s needs and running chronically short on sleep, I began to worry about my own mental capacity.  The last straw was when I started reaching for words that just weren’t “there” anymore.  How could I be an effective caregiver if I couldn’t think clearly?

I began researching ways to salvage my brain, and encountered the heartening article, Mental Exercise Helps Maintain Seniors’ Thinking Skills, from the National Institutes of Health.  The Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly (ACTIVE) study, funded by the NIH, positively demonstrated that adults between the ages of 65 and 94 can improve their cognitive abilities with proper training.  Even better, the specialized training in memory, reasoning and processing speed required only about 10 hours, and the participants maintained many of their improvements several years later!

Other articles such as Elderly Turn to Videogames to Stay Mentally Fit opened my eyes to the possibility of brain “gyms” that could assist me in efficiently re-growing neural connections in short periods of time.  If octogenarians were using video games to keep their minds fit, something similar ought to work for caregivers like me!

My search for ways to reclaim my brain let me straight to Lumosity.com.  Designed by top neuroscientists, The Lumosity brain training program encourages the neuroplasticity needed for a healthy brain.  It met my criteria for affordability at just $9.95 a month, and I was delighted to discover that I could run through a full brain workout in just 10 minutes!  And it absolutely works.  I can measure and track my enhanced mental fitness as I progress through the program, but the best proof is my ability to think more clearly, with a greater sense of alertness and happier mood.

Now Lumosity is my favorite brain fitness “secret!”  I recommend it to all my caregiver friends for their own use, as well as for their elderly loved ones.  My grandfather had advanced dementia, and was unable to work with Lumosity.  However, elderly people with less severe cognitive decline can realize substantial benefits in speed, memory, attention, flexibility and problem solving.

What is your favorite way to improve mental fitness?  Please share with our caregiver

1. Handling Unexpected Life Stories in Eldercare
   “Hurry up girls, the cops are coming!”  My grandfather’s startling words rang through the house.  I came running, and discovered him vividly reliving an incident involving illegal activities that occurred many years before I was born.
2. Mobility Joggers for Outdoor Senior Living
   My grandfather loved the outdoors, and missed his excursions when he moved into an assisted living facility.  Although he was initially satisfied with his choice to be there, he eventually became unhappy.  The staff was caring and attentive, and helped him with short outings whenever possible, but couldn’t take him out into the beautiful, wild areas for extended outings.
3. Eldercare Treasure: Rich Life Stories
   I’ve heard certain stories a thousand times (literally!) while being a caregiver for my aging family members.  These are the stories that come easily, often involving youthful escapades.
4. Healing Touch Essential Component of Eldercare
   Touch is a vital part of my life, and I believe it is a vital component of eldercare.  I began studying the effects of touch before the birth of my first child, discovering that infants will fail to thrive, even when all other needs are met, unless they are regularly held.
5. CNAs Angels of Assisted Living Facilities
   I didn’t see them at first, not really.  I was too wrapped up in my own grief, trying to come to terms with the fact that my grandmother, matriarch of our family, was at the end of her life.
6. When Parent Care is Emotionally Impossible
   “I can’t do it, Christy, I just can’t!”  My friend Yvonne called me recently after a raw conversation with her husband.  Her mother is rapidly caregiving, eldercare, self-helpapproaching the point in which she will need help managing basic daily activities.
7. Healing Power of Music in Eldercare
   Who knew music could be so good for us?!  I’m watching a fascinating documentary, The Music Instinct: Science and Song, and am amazed by the powerful ways in which music can transform our lives.
8. Essential Self Care for Caregivers
   As a caregiver I have a strong tendency to put the needs of other people above my own. I became acutely aware of this problem while caring for my toddler, 5 year old and 90 year old grandfather (with dementia) in my home.
9. Comforting Sensory-Stimulation: Compassionate Eldercare Solutions
   I had it all wrong when I ran around locking things up to keep them out of my grandfather’s reach.
10. Perfect Balance Elusive Goal in Eldercare
    I used to berate myself for failing to achieve a “perfectly balanced” daily rhythm while caregiving.