Tonight's picture was taken in March of 2009. Mattie was in-patient at the hospital and that day he went down to the physical therapy clinic. Mattie built up this pyramid of blocks, and as you can see, he was sitting behind them, anxiously awaiting to kick them all down. The building and kicking, were excellent activities to get him Mattie to use his arms and legs. Given that Mattie was recovering from limb salvaging surgery, his therapist had to find creative ways to get Mattie moving. Mattie loved a challenge and building, and therefore capitalizing on these strengths made his physical therapy sessions more effective.
Quote of the day: According to the report Caregiving in the U.S. 2020: A focused look at family caregivers of adults age 50+ (conducted by the National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP), the number of individuals caring for older adults (those 50 years or older) has increased by 7.6 million caregivers since 2015.
In one of the professional association magazines I receive in the mail, I noticed an article entitled, The mental health needs of older caregivers. Naturally this caught my attention, so I decided to read it. For those of you who may not know, family caregiving isn't just something I do, it is something I also researched for my dissertation. I conducted original research with 100 caregivers in the Washington, DC area in 2003. Given that my maternal grandmother suffered a stroke when I was in college, and I observed how her devastating illness impacted her and my whole family, I entered graduate school compelled to study this phenomenon.
While reading the article in the magazine, written by a mental health professional, I was immediately turned off. I mean way off. Mainly because she refers to those of us caregiving for aging parents as "old." I honestly couldn't get passed her terminology and therefore shut down from the whole premise of her article. When I conducted my own caregiver research, I was very sensitive to such terminology and you will never find the words elderly, senile, and other derogatory terms in my writings.
However, what caught my attention in this article, was she cited the original study, entitled, Caregiving in the USA- 2020. This study was conducted by AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving. I love the National Alliance for Caregiving and turned to them often as a graduate student, especially when I was looking for current studies and national data on caregiving.
Some of the data from Caregiving in the USA study caught my attention, and I inserted a couple of the bar graphs below.
When I see this actual data, it makes me pause and really reflect on why I am so tired. I try to push this reality aside (otherwise I couldn't get through the day, week, year), but these charts speak for themselves. It is very difficult caregiving for one person, but I have two and I have done this now since November of 2021, without a day off, time away, or any kind of break. It is no surprise that one loses one's self in the process, becomes isolated, and worse I have gotten used to this isolation because I know juggling any sort of social outlet would only further exhaust me.
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