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Katherine Puckett, Ph.D.
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VIDEO: Katherine Puckett, Ph.D. – Caregivers New Role, How Can You Assist This Person Learn She Needs Care?

Katherine Puckett, Ph.D. explains how she assists a lifelong caregiver become accepting in her new role as the person needing care.

Katherine Puckett, Ph.D.:
One of the complications we sometimes see when a woman gets cancer is that the role she may typically have had is one of a caregiver to others. Women are often socialized in our world to take care of other people. So, when a woman is the one who then needs to be cared for, it may be hard for her to reach out and ask for help and to accept help.

Well, that’s one of the things we address with our patients dealing with cancer is really encouraging them and sometimes showing them how to reach out and ask for help themselves, and to tell people what they need and want from them.

What we often find is that caregivers, either family or friends, want to help and they usually don’t know what to do. They feel kind of helpless, and so they may just start making it up, and they might decide, for instance, to start to feed this woman with cancer. The cancer patient might not want to eat at that point or might not feel like eating, but she might not know she should say something about that to her caregivers.

So, this is something we have dealt with so often at Cancer Treatment Centers of America. I am sure it’s seen everywhere. A woman who needs to start being a little more assertive about letting her caregivers know what she needs and wants.

So using the food as an example, sometimes a woman going through treatment might not feel like eating. She has got some pain or discomfort, or has lost her appetite, or treatment makes her feel nauseous, so she doesn’t feel like eating. The family members out of love and caring, but also out of fear may see her not eating and think, “Oh, this is really a problem; got to make her eat.” So they start telling her to eat. They bring her food; they tell her what to do.

The best success will be if that woman can say to them, “This is what I need from you. This is what I want from you.” Or, “This is what I don’t need and want. Yes, I do want you to offer me food; no, I don’t.”

I had a woman I worked with who didn’t even want to hear names of foods suggested to her. Her family, trying to be helpful, kept saying, “Well, eat this, eat this,” and she is like, “No, don’t even talk to me about food.” So, I helped her to be able to say that to her family so she could let them know what she wanted and helped the family say, "Follow her lead, follow the lead of the patient." The patient is the one who needs to be in charge as much as possible, going through the treatment.

The patient then needs to learn they got to speak up. It's going to work better for you if you do, and that may extend beyond eating, maybe in terms of asking somebody to come and do the grocery shopping or walk the dog or clean the house. Usually once you make some suggestions to a woman and see that other people want to follow on those suggestions, they just might need to be told what to do, usually works better.

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