Transporting care recipients can bring on caregiver stress . On the days that my friend takes her mother to doctor’s visits she has a hard time getting her in and out of her car. I have watched my friend increasingly crumble under stress ever since her mother became unable to stand, especially on the days that she takes her to the doctor. For her mother, these are special days. It is a chance to escape the facility, go to Walmart’s, pick up Chinese food and/or get a manicure. Because when you live in an assisted care facility, getting out for any reason is an opportunity to feel normal. So my friend makes every effort to make these days possible.
But without special equipment or manpower, my friend can no longer get her mother from the wheelchair into her SUV. She realized this after she and her sister tried it but her mother wound up on the ground, fortunately not seriously hurt. But because these trips mean so much to her mother, she is determined to find a way to make it work.
“The ability of the family caregivers to provide quality care and contribute to the management of chronic disease is a vital health care resource,” I learned from one report. But it hadn’t occurred to me that the ability to transport love ones qualified as a vital healthcare resource. But clearly it is when you see how much it means to her mother.
Without money, however, to buy a hoist and a new van, she will —at least for now — need to identify other resources and a new plan to solve this problem. So besides the 6 things every Caregiver should know to drive stress away, here is Sharon Couto’s Tips for including care-recipients on Summer Day trips. She lays out how a caregiver should plan a typical day.
My friend now knows she must gather additional help from family and friends in order to build a team to help her. In the absence of family she has to wrangle help from someone working in the assisted facility. But what she really must do is start saving for a car that contains a lift. Until that time my friend will be working on creating a caregiving team.
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Patricia A. Patton is a member of AARP’s Blogger Kitchen Cabinet on #caregiving, #caresupport, #carekc issues. All opinions are her own.
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