Can Alzheimer’s Caregiving Get Easier?
While caregiving will always be one of the most demanding yet rewarding careers, some caregivers are speaking out about how it can get easier as the years pass. For instance, many say that after gathering information through observation your first year in, the years following become a bit easier to adapt to. As years go on, you learn about how you can use the skills you have obtained in caring for your current clients, as well as utilizing the information to care for others in the future.
Key Takeaways:
- Care-giving is a very difficult task which the author characterizes as the most difficult occupation of her life. The work involved fills the entire day.
- Alzheimer’s causes intense dementia and memory loss. The author learned to recognize confusion and sadness when her mother used the term “different.” As the disease progressed, discontent decreased.
- The mental deterioration of dementia led to more difficulty in care-giving tasks but also lessened the amount of effort to soothe mental distress.
“The effort it takes to foster contentedness in my mother, who lives in the late middle stages of Alzheimer’s Disease – that seems easier to me.”
