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Hello and welcome to the Own Your Health podcast, I'm Cyndi Lynne and I can't wait to help you step into your health power. Today's topic is the Healthy Caregiver. So many of my clients and my listeners find themselves in the position of caring for friends and family members.
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And very often it's not a conscious decision that's made, it's just a role that sort of evolves and it sometimes devolves in terms of their health and their impact on their life.
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So I'm going to give you a few tips today, a few recommendations for how you can stay healthy and still be a caregiver for those that you love. First of all, step back and make the conscious decision.
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Do you want to participate in this caregiving? And if so, if you truly do, then decide what you want your role to be. Are you going to be the primary, the primary contact primary care facilitator and I'll talk about that shortly.
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It doesn't mean that you have to provide all of the hands on care, but are you going to be the care coordinator or are you better suited to be a helper to someone else who's the care coordinator. And really stop and think about what is it that will fit in your life with how you have wanted to choose your health and your health journey?
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So let me give you some examples here. Very often we find ourselves in the midst of care. It evolves from a situation that takes a turn. A family member becomes ill unexpectedly and they need some help. But it very often is not a temporary condition.
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So when you're considering and making your decision, and I encourage you to be intentional about making that decision, ask yourself, is this a temporary situation? Am I going to be helping someone for six weeks after a surgery and then the helping will be done?
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Or is this an elderly person who's going to need not only continued help, but more help as time goes on? Two very different situations, when you know there's an endpoint and when there is no endpoint and in fact there's escalating care that will be needed.
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The second thing, when you're making this intentional decision on how you want to best support your loved one as well as your own health, is asking, do I want to be the primary coordinator? And I use these terms because I think of this kind of role when I help my clients through it.
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I think of this kind of role as being a project manager. And that might sound a little impersonal, but it does bring with it the weight and understanding and magnitude of this project that you're going to take on.
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So if you're going to be the project coordinator, it may not be that you're going to give every bath that this person has. You may be the one that facilitates and arranges. And if that's the case, then you have a little bit more latitude in when and where you can provide help.
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And we'll come back to some of those further decision makings. The other alternative, if you're not going to be the care coordinator or project coordinator, is that you're actually going to give hands on care. You are going to be the person who's going to help with bathing or help with hair washing, or help preparing meals or cleaning someone's house.
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And if you want to participate, if you want to contribute on that level, it's probably even more important that you recognize what your health journey is so that you can have very clear boundaries about what you are able to do and how much time you're able to give.
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So again, this may sound very impersonal, may sound very distant, and you may be thinking of a time that or a situation that you're in right now saying, wait a minute, I don't get to decide. All of this stuff just needs to be done. But nobody can do it all forever without deteriorating themselves.
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And then we see something that's very sad and that is the primary total caregiver becomes ill, whether that be a spouse or a son or daughter or a parent, they become ill and everything falls apart.
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Because that was the only plan, if you will, that was the only thing that was in place. So by thinking about this caregiving role in project terms, thinking about it in more complex resource terms, you have the opportunity to create an actual structure that will provide better long term support and allow you to maintain your health and your life.
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Let's go into a few examples because I think a lot of these will ring bells with folks. Hands on. Are you the meal provider? Does that mean you're going to cook and take every meal to the person that you're helping?
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If you're helping someone for a couple of weeks after surgery or even a few weeks after somebody has a baby, then yeah, you could probably cook that many meals and transport them and deliver them, and that probably is sustainable for that short period of time.
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If you're considering an older person who's no longer able to cook for themselves at all, can you provide every meal indefinitely? No. I can tell you already the answer is no. Unless you have a catering service, in which case it's the service that would actually be providing the meals.
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And I use that example because if you choose to be the person or if you feel like you ended up being the person who's responsible for all of the food, you do have choices, you can facilitate it, you can connect with things like Meals on Wheels, you can connect with the individual's church home, you can make these connections and you can facilitate meals being delivered without having to deliver them and prepare them all yourself.
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So shifting from a completely hands on to a coordinating sort of role just in that one area. The same is true for personal care. Whether it's helping somebody exercise, helping somebody bathe, washing someone's hair, that's not sustainable over a very long term.
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So you can be the person who arranges some of it and then does the things that you most enjoy doing. So for many people, many daughters who are caring for their mothers that I work with, they really enjoy going once a week helping their mom wash their hair, set it in rollers, because, yep, that's still, that's still a thing.
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Blow it, comb it out, get it all set and have their mom looking like she looks and has looked for years, and looking in a way that she recognizes herself when she looks in the mirror.
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And that's once, maybe twice a week. It's a valuable together time and it's something that continues to build memories. On the other hand, being there to actually bathe someone on a daily basis or be responsible for all of the changes of clothing typically is not sustainable unless you're actually living in the house and doing all of the laundry for the whole house for example. If you're the person who is coordinating overall, then of course you can work to arrange, outsource, find resources for some of these tasks and pick and choose the ones that you would like to engage in or that you're able to engage in.
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Many of my clients are still working full time. They have kids in high school. They can't be everywhere at once. And as soon as they realize that, as soon as, as soon as they give themselves permission, and very often they'll say to me, thank you for giving me permission, but I, I just remind you that the permission is out there, but you can give yourself permission to do your best in caring for someone through a variety of avenues, through arranging care, through arranging different housing situations, arranging company, arranging nursing care, arranging overnight stays, all of these things become possible, and and there's a whole world of things to investigate out there as soon as you know that you don't have to be and in fact you can't really be the person that gives all of the care indefinitely and still remain healthy yourself.
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So once you get to that point, once you realize, all right, this isn't sustainable, you know, this is something I could do for two weeks or I could do for three or four weeks. If somebody recovers from surgery long term, as someone is perhaps declining or becoming more ill, it's not sustainable long term.
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As soon as you come to that conclusion, then you can do something that we work very hard to do here in the Own Your Health Group, and that is to ask better questions. What is the best way to get this type of care? What is the best way to get physical therapy at home?
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What is the best way to make a parent's home safer? And once you start asking those questions, that leads you to the resources that can actually help you. Now, I don't want to at all understate the time and energy it takes to be a project manager.
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Even if you never administer any care yourself, it's very time consuming. There's a huge learning curve that goes with it. But it's a possibility. It's options for you.
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And when you choose to own your health, it's about finding options. It's about asking those better questions, and it's about not finding yourself stuck in situations. And for years, many of my clients were moms with young kids who felt a little bit stuck in not having time for themselves, not being able to take care of their own health.
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Now, we're at the other end of this. We're moms who want to see our kids play sports in high school, want us, want to attend college events, and at the same time have parents and aunts and uncles who need our help.
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And this is part of being that sandwich. This is part of the actual joy of having kids growing up in your home and still having your parents or your aunts and uncles around.
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So it's a blessing. And it's a blessing that comes with opportunities to get those project management skills polished up again. Now, if you'd like help with this, because that's absolutely critical, please reach out.
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I can connect you with resources, make suggestions, or we can work on plans together. The information to talk with me is in the show notes below. And I wish you all kinds of luck on your health journey and your healthy caretaker journey.
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So until next time, let's go out and own it.
