It'll come as no surprise to anyone that care-giving is stressful.
But what does that really mean? I mean, in terms of what it does to you?
Following my care-giving for Martha Sr, I spent a lot of time "recovering" from being a long-term care-provider. Here's an excerpt from something I wrote about 6 months after her death:
A month ago I wrote about slowly coming down from the prolonged adrenalin high which was being a full time care provider. Doctors have known for a while that such long term stress was hard on care providers. It'll drive up blood pressure, screw with your sleep habits, and even compromise your immune system. Now they have started to figure out how that immune system mechanism works. Last night I caught a piece on NPR's All Things Considered with UCLA professor Rita Effros about her research on this mechanism. What professor Effros said (no transcript yet, so this excerpt is my transcription):
So, in the short term cortisol does a lot of really good things. The problem is, if cortisol stays high in your bloodstream for long periods of time, all those things that got shut down short term stay shut down. For example, your immune system.
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But let's say you were taking care of an Alzheimer's spouse, or a chronically ill child - those kinds of situations are known now to cause chronic, really long-term stress - let's say years of stress.
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(These care providers) were found to have a funny thing happening in their white blood cells. A certain part of the cell is called the telomere, which is a kind of a clock which keeps track of how hard the cell has been working. Their telomeres got shorter and shorter, and it has been known for many years that when cells have very short telomeres they don't function the way they're supposed to function.
There's a lot more there, with additional links to various health studies and whatnot, but basically it's been shown that care-giving of this sort increases the rate at which your body ages.
For me, that translated into several concrete health changes. I now have chronically high blood pressure (under control with medication), whereas my bp was 'perfect' before we started care-giving. I put on about 60 pounds, and have been struggling in the three years since I wrote that passage to get it back down. It took a full year for my sleep habits to even begin to return to normal. Et cetera.
I don't want this post to be about me - just to use myself as an example of what happens to care-givers. It's a sacrifice that we willingly make, though we may not know fully what it is that we're doing to ourselves. And all I can say is that all care-givers should keep this in mind, and do everything they can to manage the stress they are under . . . whenever possible.
Please share your own stories of stress, what it did to you, and what you did to help deal with it.
CareGiving Kos is a community diary series posted generally on Sunday morning and Wednesday evening by volunteer diarists. This group & series is for those who are now (or have been) in the role of being a care-giver for a loved one. We want this space to be supportive and free of squabbles. Our only rule is to be kind to yourself and others who are going through a very difficult time. Please respect the concept of this group: No Politics Here.1
1 By "no politics" we don't mean "avoid politics completely" - it's too relevant, at times, to portions of the topics discussed. But keep any references to politics focused and within the context of the caregiving topic. Avoid flames, flaming, flame-wars and dragging the discussion off-topic. Thank you.