Caregiver Stress

What an awful day! I learned a hard lesson--I wrote a blog offline and then lost it when I tried to sign on. Of course, I'll never recapture what I wrote. Maybe it was a good thing. Maybe I wrote some things that I shouldn't have. Guess I'm a little superstitious. :-) It's that good Catholic upbringing.

I must be sick; I felt terrible all day. I was really depressed and finally gave in and cried, but it wasn't that healthy, healing crying. Instead I felt worse afterwards and kept breaking into tears the rest of the day. I broke my diet and ate three candy bars, hoping maybe that would make me feel better. It made me feel worse. I couldn't eat anything the rest of the day, so Mary had to eat lunch and dinner alone. Plus, I didn't really attend to her at all, so she was kind of alone all day. I felt even worse about that.

What’s wrong with me? Am I depressed? Do I spend too much time taking care of Mary and not enough time taking care of me? Is the problem that I haven’t found a job yet? That I feel so worthless because I have two Masters degrees and can’t find a job? That I put so much hope in this presidential election after being so disappointed by the last one? Well, if it’s any consolation, at least almost half of America agrees with me. At least my mom voted the same way I did this time. That’s a victory—to finally wrest her from my father’s power over her in the political arena. And no, I didn’t put any pressure on her to vote my way. I didn’t even ask who she was going to vote for until after the fact. She thinks I’m a bit wacko that I’m so upset about it, but I don’t see how people can not be. Oh well. Enough of politics. Everyone is surely sick to death of that.

Back to Mary. I took her to the eye doctor yesterday. He said she has cataracts. She’s complained quite often over the last few months about not being able to see as well as she used to. Now she suddenly says she’s fine. Yes, I feel sick about this, too. What do I do? I don’t want her to be operated on and have something go wrong. Anna had a cataract operation and now one of her eyes is permanently damaged. The thought of someone sticking a needle into Mary’s eye and scraping her lens out and then inserting a new one… It makes my skin crawl. What to do? Who can I turn to? How did I get this responsibility? Is this doctor just trying to make money off of her? I was there when the assistant asked her to read the letter chart and she couldn’t make very many of the letters out. Now when I ask her to read the paper to me or what’s on the TV screen, she does just fine. I just want to scream! Her appointment is set for next Tuesday morning. Will she put up a fight? What if she puts all of her trust in me and something goes wrong?

An odd thing happened this morning. She’d die if she knew I was telling anyone. When I went to help her pull up her panties and pajama bottoms after using the potty right after she got up, I couldn’t find her panties. I’d just seen her wipe, so I couldn’t believe my first suspicion, which turned out to be right. She hadn’t gotten her panties down and just peed right through them. She couldn’t believe it, either. I made lightly of it—the last thing I want is for her to be embarrassed about something like that. I joked about how she hadn’t had her coffee yet and wasn’t awake yet.

She wanted to sit out on the porch today, but I got her to move into the living room and parked her in her lazy boy in front of the TV all day. Another thing to feel guilty about. I just couldn’t stand to see her sitting out there, staring out he window. Better to see her staring at the TV. Some days she’s really interested in the newspaper, but sometimes she barely glances at it. Odd how uninterested in the election she was. Is it because she can’t understand what they’re talking about or because she figures she won’t be around for the next one? I doubt if it’s the latter. That’s too deep for Mary and she swears she never thinks about how long she’s going to live.

One of her favorite sayings (in various situations) is that she doesn’t care about anything. She never gets upset—because she just doesn’t care. She’s such a diplomatic person. Doesn’t hold a grudge. Other people’s annoying habits don’t bother her in the least. She just laughs them off. Not like me in the least. She’s told me several times (when, despite herself, I did manage to perturb her a bit) that she’d never want to be married to someone who gets so upset about things. Of course, when you’re having menstrual cramps and a migraine and feeling sick to your stomach and trying to get a fashion-conscious 93-year-old who thinks her pant legs are too wide but doesn’t have any other pants that fit her 100-pound, 4-foot frame with 40-inch hips to an 8 AM doctor’s appointment, it’s hard not to lose your temper. The horrible thing is that I never know when I’m going to lose my temper or when something’s going to come out with that nasty tone of voice. That’s part of the problem. I say something that isn’t in and of itself bad, but the voice sounds like it’s coming from some evil demon. They all say what an angel I am and how God will prepare a special place in heaven for me for everything I do—argh! That makes me want to scream, too. I always reply that I’ve done enough bad stuff to compensate for any good I do.