I'm fed up of my father saying "you wouldn't make a very good nurse" when I'm a bit short with him. I snapped this morning and told him he wasn't a very good father. I then threw his shirt at him and told him to struggle on his own. I went back into the room a minute or so later and got him dressed. Today has been difficult because his normal carer was ill and the day off I was planning and looking forward to didn't happen. Added to that I have some difficult personal stuff going on and I have nobody to talk to about it.
I'm not a very compassionate person, I admit it. I'd never have chosen to pursue a career in caring and I'm not trained for it. I don't ever get to shut the door and leave the premises to go on with my life.
Not expecting any solutions, just having a bit of a rant, really, but hopefully someone else will see how I'm feeling and feel the same way so know they're not alone. Unless I'm the only one who feels like this!
I remember clearly during a very difficult period when mother's Alzheimer's was challenging on all levels - physical and psychological - that my sister very kindly came from her home in France to assist me in mother's care. On one occasion when we were preparing to dress my mother she presented with a stubborn and abrasive attitude which my sister found eminently frustrating in the light of her having forfeited time, expense and what was a settled life style in rural France, post the loss of her partner. All of that came to a head on that morning and she snapped at mother and stormed out of the bedroom. My mother was oblivious to it all. I remember her gazing somewhat bewildered at myself, not uttering a word. I knew that deep down inside my mother's brain existed the "genuine " mother. The one who adored her daughter, who would look forward to the daily telephone call to France , who never failed to praise my sister for her innate generosity. Yet all of that was absent now , just an irate ninety year old who seemed hell bent on being awkward, ungrateful and aggressive. My sister was not a Carer. She had been a professional nurse. She had trained at Great Ormond Street and had witnessed the extremes of disease, deformity and abject sickness in innocents, many of whom died in her hands. She had nursed on psychiatric wards and later lectured and even at the height of her career appeared at the Old Bailey in defence of a nurse. In short, she was equipped with resources to deal with matters far beyond the mundane. She told me on the day she returned home to southern France, that the two weeks during her stay with me and tending to my mother had been " a real learning curve " and she confessed to feeling inadequate at one point, as the situation was simply so challenging that she snapped.
We, as Carers and especially as partners or siblings being so very close to the one we love, are still vulnerable and subject to fatigue and frustration and moments in which our ' capacity' dictates . We react just as we would in normality with all that implies. We can give and take , tit for tat, knowing that cognition allows for equal response and resolution. This goes on all the time, often on very subtle terms. But dementia is a completely different animal. It poses conflict, bitterness, aggressive behaviour in the guise of the person we know so very well and it seems so very intentional and convincing - just as with my mother with her daughter. Yet we know that the actuality is not so. We know that dementia claims a brain and acts out its own agenda within the body of the one we know and love. This is a fact not a theory. What we do not know, is how it must feel to live with any one of the many dementias. What strange and confusing world confronts a Dementia mind? What emotions, what images, what anxieties. What promotes the tears in an old lady shuffling down the corridor in the Care Home and her sobbing as she takes hold of your hand and gazes longingly into your eyes, saying nothing. Just a poignant and powerful expression of a plea so evident in those aged, tired and bewildered eyes.
Yes, we are allowed a rant or at least some respite if we are not to go under ourselves. This is the reality of dementia care. It is perhaps one of the most demanding of life's challenges and we do not undergo training for any of it. The training is in the relationship with dementia as it lives within the one we care for and that is, alas, the only authentic learning process because you live it in actual fact. And even with all of that, you count your blessings because you are at worst, the Carer, at best, are not the one who is living with dementia.
