5 Tips for the Caregiver to Stay On Top Of Things

5 tips for the caregiver to stay on top of things

1. Find quiet time each day by yourself to plan the day in an orderly sequence
2. Know when to take a break and stop being a caregiver – even for an hour a week (it doesn’t have to be a daily thing)
3. Get as much sleep as you can, even a cat nap whenever you feel rundown (if you’re in the waiting room and the patient is being treated and you’re by yourself)
4. Don’t try to be superman or superwoman and do it all in one day – you can’t
5. Repeat – try to get rest and more sleep

These may seem very basic, but if you’re caregiving you know basic is all it takes to get things done and take care of yourself as well. Try a few, tell me how they go.

Caring for a Child – In Reverse

In my book, I wrote about having to treat the patient more and more like a child growing in reverse. While some may think of this as harsh, I found that as the cancer progressed, my wife was less and less independent and needed more and more care. Toward the end, she could not even feed herself. I had to literally spoon feed her as one does with a baby.

The real point is that the caregiver has to increase his/her efforts at caregiving as the patient’s condition continues to deteriorate. This then is one of the physical challenge of being asked to do more when you are becoming more tired and exhausted from caregiving as time goes on. There is also the emotional strength needed to see a loved one slip away little by little and know that he/she knows they are slipping away.

We have to find our inner strength each in our own way, but we have to be prepared to take care of a person who will become more and more dependent on you as time goes on toward the end – more like a child that needs our constant attention and love.

 

Learning to Become the Caregiver

When my wife was diagnosed with cancer, my father had passed away the year earlier from cancer also. For him, I helped my mother navigate through the paperwork in two countries as my parents lived overseas. I had some idea of the effort it took to stay focused and get day-to-day tasks accomplished as I helped my mother. Now, I was faced with this same challenge and I felt I had to find a way to help myself. My friend, Jane Michael, had a draft manuscript of her book, Better Than Before, about cancer patients and caregivers. I had read the manuscript long before I was aware of my role as a caregiver. So, when I became a caregiver, I was at least intellectually knowledgable about the task ahead of me.

Image provided by Marshall Segal

I decided to write the book for many reasons. Some things in life we become good at because we do it very often and get good at it. The role of caregiver is hopefully one that we never become accustomed to. As I was learning to be a caregiver, I found a plethora of resources online in the form of books about the spiritual and emotional challenges of being a caregiver, but none about how to be one day-to-day. As I have seen in my business career that too many start up and small companies waste time and resources “re-inventing the wheel” doing basic things, I felt that other caregivers out there would do what I had just done – re-invent ways to deal day-to-day. While my tips are by no means comprehensive, I hope it provides some ideas to use that don’t have to be “re-invented”. I hope other caregivers will find other and better ways of doing what I did, so that we all can collaborate and learn with each other.

I developed tips throughout my time as a caregiver that I continuously chose to look back upon for assistance when I was in the greatest need. Have you ever noticed athletes, even great ones, sometimes suddenly play inextricably badly? That usually happens at a crucial and stressful point in the competition. Their brains suddenly become overwhelmed by stress and/or fear of failure, even though they done it a thousand times before. The same thing happens to us when put into other life-stressing situations. Usually for an athlete, he/she can call a time out and go talk with a coach and say, “what am I doing wrong?” or “what do I do next?”. Who or what can a caregiver turn to when we have stressed out? The times this stress happens is almost always a time when it is inconvenient, if not impossible, to contact someone (like in the middle of the night when you have to take the patient to the emergency room). I would rely upon the tips I developed to help me get through the day.