Why Helping Caregivers is Important to Me
Hello and thank you for taking the time to read more about why helping caregivers is important to me.
My personal experience with caregiving comes from both sides. I was a caregiver and I was also a patient.
Remembering the feeling of being overwhelmed, alone, and not sure if I could make it one more day as a caregiver gave me a heart for caregivers and a desire to help.
If you find yourself in that situation, I pray you will find something on our website to give you some tools or help that will make your caregiving journey just a little easier.
My journey began a long time ago. Like most long trips, mine involves a lot of twists, turns, and detours along the way, so, I’ll just give you the highlights.
Being a Benefits Specialist for a large company, provided me with the foundation for understanding benefit plans and navigating the world of medical insurance.
Spending 10 years in a doctor’s office as a patient advocate showed me face-to-face the impact that illness can have on the patient, the caregivers, and their family.
Then came a firsthand, up close, and personal experience as a caregiver when my husband Tony’s melanoma came back with a vengeance, after a 10-year reprieve.
Now, the patient was MY family and not someone sitting across the desk from me that would leave my office.
Now, I was the one dealing every day, all day long with insurance claims, doctor appointments, medication, treatment schedules, and all those things were added to an already full schedule of the routine duties required by life.
Even with my experience, I was now the one struggling, not knowing what to do next and feeling like no one understood what I was going through. I didn’t know what questions to ask and wondered what I was missing, what crisis might come next, what I needed to look out for, and I was an emotional mess, all the while learning all new lessons.
Tony’s death in 2010 ended my journey as a caregiver and began the journey of grieving while dealing with the overwhelming and sometimes complicated “business” of death. (That journey is a whole different story.)
Two years after his death, breast cancer gave me a whole new set of lessons and provided me with a different perspective of caregiving as I was now the patient.
The diagnosis of Triple Negative Breast Cancer came first. If you don’t know that name, Triple Negative is the “bad” kind of breast cancer. It is more aggressive than other types of breast cancer and the statistics for success are not as promising. Triple Negative is so named because it doesn’t respond to the three main types of treatments that are successful for other types of Breast Cancer.
Over the next two years, I would have a lumpectomy and radiation for the Triple Negative diagnosis, only then to be diagnosed with yet another type of Breast Cancer. Good grief! This time the diagnosis was DCIS, which is the “good” kind of breast cancer to have, and which is treated very successfully.
However, given the second Breast Cancer diagnosis, I decided to have a mastectomy. Multiple surgeries and a failed attempt at reconstruction followed that decision. The good news is that in 2022, 10 years after the initial Triple Negative diagnosis, I have been released from my oncologist, having passed the critical point for when the disease may return.
Healthy (mostly), I am living a great life. In ways too numerous to list, God blessed me beyond measure during my journey and I now want to share some of the lessons I’ve learned and tools I’ve discovered in hopes of helping others.
One of my sweetest blessings is Rascal, my amazing Australian Cattle Dog. He came to live with me about 8 months after Tony died. (I believe God sent him to me.) Rascal has been my constant companion since then and shares my home in the country of Northwest Georgia.
Retired, I now spend my time volunteering and trying to help others going through some of the same difficulties that I experienced.
As a volunteer with the hospice that helped Tony during the last days of his life, I make weekly calls to several families to “check in” with them. Wednesday mornings usually find me in art class where talking, visiting, and having fun are as much a part of the class (maybe more) than the art.
I am honored to be a Volunteer Community Educator with the Alzheimer’s Association and to host a support group for those who have family living with Alzheimer’s or dementia. I also have the C.A.R.E.S Dementia Specialist designation.
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