As a caregiver for her Alzheimer's father, Maureen shares how she prevent personalizing her frustrations with him.
Maureen:
You learn, it’s all a learning curve, you learn to not take what he is telling me as personal. It’s the disease. It’s the disease that’s talking, it’s the disease that’s responding, it’s not my dad as I have known him. He still looks like him. He has a lot of his traits. He still has his sense of humor. He can be a really fun guy.
So, what I need to do as a caregiver is to encourage those traits and then things that I can really, negotiate his frustration. I can aggravate it or I can diminish it. A caregiver has a lot of power, and I don’t know that they often realize that this situation that is so anguished at home can literally be eliminated simply by recognizing the patient’s need, reassuring them that things are going to be fine, and you don't have to take care of it today, you can take care of it tomorrow, and those are the kinds of things that reassure the patient that things are okay.
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