Being a Caretaker During a Pandemic
When the nursing home option isn’t really an option. A report from the front lines.
My husband and I just spent a weekend away from home. We went to Lancaster to visit a childhood friend of his. But mostly, we just needed to get out of the house. Together at the same time.
A couple of things came up on this trip that I feel the need to process.
Taking care of people who have Alzheimer’s is hard and only gets harder.
Both of my husband’s parents have Alzheimer’s Disease. They’ve lived with us for six years, since it first became clear that they weren’t safe living on their own anymore.
For the last three years, my husband has been their full-time caregiver. When I say fulltime, I mean it. This isn’t a 40-hour-a-week job. If they could only have care forty hours a week, they would need to be in a nursing home.
This is a never-ending, 24-hour-a-day job. And it’s the kind of job that consistently gets harder as time goes by.
His father is in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s. Here’s what that looks like:
- He’s mostly incoherent and struggles to put…
