Maggie asks, "What happens when the caregiver becomes the patient?"

Transcript

I care for my mother who lives with me. She’s 90 years old. Like any 90-year-old, I physically need to help her. Just even getting her in and out of the house takes, not just strength, but some perseverance. She has some dementia and she’s actually very good for a 90-year-old, but has some dementia. But I find my patience being tested now in a way that it wasn’t before. I find I can’t cook for her properly so I worry about that. I cannot bring her to the doctor. I’m also a caregiver to my sister, although she doesn’t live with me now anymore … So, in the beginning when I was really feeling all these symptoms and they were just awful, and I knew that I needed to get help, something was really wrong. And I knew that – I called my family doctor, he was away, so I made a decision to go to emerg. It took me four days to be able to get to emerg, because I had to make arrangements for my mom. I had to make arrangements for my sister. I had to get her to an oncologist appointment somehow. So, I had to arrange for a taxi, blah, blah, blah. So, those things that I do for them as caregiver and I do happily, when you’re the patient you don’t have a way to have any backup. There’s no system in place that, you know, there’s no 1-800 call a caregiver. So, there’s nobody at the other end of the phone that I can say, look until I sort this out, what can we do to make sure my mom is OK?

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