Simple Approaches

I always liked multiple choice tests in school. I knew the right answer was there, I just had to deduct which of the choices available to me was the right one. Easy, right?! Except not when you have Alzheimer’s. I have found that asking mom a question with more than one option causes her confusion and distress. “Would you like to watch the end of the movie or are you ready to go to bed?” will trigger either a single word answer of yes or no, or it causes a pained look and then she will lay her head back against the chair and close her eyes tightly. I then feel horribly guilty and try to rephrase the question into one choice. “Do you want to watch the end of the movie?” I usually get an answer that way that makes sense. It’s all a question of simplicity… Or should I say it’s all about a simplistic question.

I would also like to say that I continue to be worried about the time that Mom is spending sleeping. I’m finding that my spidey senses are tingling like mad, they are telling me that I’m losing her, but I have no reason to think that. So I asked the week day caregiver what she thought about the way things were going. She hesitated and then said that she is not allowing herself to start grieving or believing that the end is approaching because there is nothing on which to pin that feeling, it’s just… there.  Is it the holidays, the grey, rainy weather that mkes us feel that way or is it something else? I guess only time will answer that simple question for us.

As I've stated, I want this blog to be about the caregiver process, as well as tracking Mom’s day to day progress for family and friends, so I’m going to segway here to a caregiver note on what I call quiet stress.

We each have tell-tale signals that our bodies give us to warn us that we are under stress. Mine happen to be my psoriasis and the small blisters that I get in my mouth. I had been having flaring ups of both indicators lately, but I don’t feel stressed about anything, per se. I have the usual stresses, 15 places I need to be this week and caregivers taking time off through the holiday season, no Christmas gifts lined up yet, a house that needs to be decorated, changes in my health care provider, braces that were cutting my mouth, not enough sleep at night and a million other things that we all deal with every day. But nothing that is really causing me “stress” as I would define it. So I ignored the signs, blamed them on other things and they got worse. Once I admitted that they were stress related, I knew what to do to treat them and I have done that. However, I have to find a way to contain the “stress” or the symptoms will return. So I do what works for me... I make lists.

I make lists of the things I need to do, the people I need to contact, the appointments I need to schedule for my Mom, the meetings I have to attend, the maintenance items I have to handle…. All of it goes on to a list. Then I break it out into small, manageable chunks that I can accomplish each day. As things are marked off the list, I feel like I’ve made a step forward. If something new is added to the list, that’s fine, it just gets put in its place and I deal with it in turn. I try not to set too many things into a single day because, if I don’t get them done, I add a layer of stress for not pushing hard enough. As with mom and the questions, I try to keep it simple. And there is nothing as satisfying as coming to the end of my list for the day and seeing most, if not all, of my projects scratched off. If I don’t make the list, I can be busy all day, but I still sit down at the end and feel like I got nothing accomplished, because I didn’t finish everything, or, even worse, I remember something that I had forgotten to do while I was out. Yeah, that one really aggravates me! And that aggravates my stress level. So this week I am busy crossing off my lists… and crossing off the quiet stresses that I was not even aware were building.