Barbara Webb was a caregiver for 15 years without knowing it
Caregivers are often family members who put their lives on hold to care for elderly family members.
My mother said to me once, “I feel you’ve missed your calling because of me.” Then she cried.
About a month after the birth of my first-born son, my mother was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. She was rushed to the hospital where doctors discovered an abscess that ate out her entire left thigh muscle from her hip to her knee. It took a whole year to heal and required daily attention. I was the only family member who could stomach assisting the nurse in changing the gauze that packed the open wound while it healed. That is when I became her caregiver.
But it wasn’t my first experience in the role.
When I was 20 years old my mother asked if I would go to my brother’s farm in Victor, New York to assist my sister-in-law after serious medical complications arose during the third trimester of her second pregnancy that jeopardized her unborn baby.
I lived on their farm doing household and farm chores, cooking meals and caring for my one-year-old niece. Looking back on that experience, it’s obvious to me now that I could have done a better job.
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After all, being a caregiver involves ensuring that your loved one is content and living in a stress-free environment. Living on the farm had put my social life on hold. I hated their cellar with the dirt floor and low ceilings full of cobwebs (of course the laundry machines were in the farthest, scariest corner) and I remember constantly complaining. One day I even complained about eating cold toast.
But, I must have done something right because they chose me to be my nephew’s Godmother. To this day, that honour overwhelms me. I still feel great knowing that I contributed to the life of my nephew. But, during that experience, I never called myself a caregiver.
It was only after my mother died, 10 years after her diagnosis, that I realized I had become a caregiver. I did not see it as an act of nobility, although she made me feel it was.
I was available to my mother in ways my siblings couldn’t be, due to their own work and family commitments. I was working contracts for the local regional police at the time and my shift work made me available to take her to doctor appointments. After a hiring freeze ended the contract work, I continued helping my parents over the following years, while remaining a stay-at-home mom.
My mother was an amazing woman who focused on her family. Images of her backyard include fresh-cut grass, a large garden, maple trees that reached for the sky and a constantly filled clothesline of freshly-washed clothes. We had roast beef, potatoes and peas on Sundays with apple pie for dessert. She loved us and it showed in her pride for her home.
When she developed glaucoma and cataracts, she was too proud and too embarrassed to tell anyone that she couldn’t see to trim her toenails.
When I finally noticed, her toes were painful to look at. But it was the look on her face – the embarrassment, the sense of hopelessness – that changed it all for me.
The World Wide Web wasn’t filled with advice as it is today, so I constantly picked the brains of the pharmacists and read all the pamphlets on her prescriptions. I learned what I could about blood sugar levels, sodium intake, caloric intake, fats. I read the labels on all of her food. With my two kids and my mother in tow, weekly grocery outings would take at least three hours.
I worked part-time when I could, I went to university part time, but much of my world revolved around my parents – my father had a heart condition and complications from one of his legs, which had been amputated at the knee due to an old war injury – while my kids played in their back yard. As much as I tried, working full time just didn’t work.
Some days I would rebel. I would take my kids out of school for a picnic and a swim or a hike. I made them promises I hoped I could keep someday. Some days I would just go myself, until the day came when I returned and found my dad had suffered a slight heart attack. Though he was okay, my mom was distraught over the experience. That is when I got my first cell phone. She bought it so that she could always reach me.
Things got harder. My mom was really slowing down, napping all the time and having pain that only I knew about. She didn’t want to worry the rest of the family, especially after my father died. By then I had already walked away from school.
Getting my mother’s doctors to cooperate with me was nothing less than an irritating chore – for all of those years. I was perceived as an unemployed, uneducated single mom. I was rarely taken seriously, even when I tried to tell them that there was something else wrong with her that was irritating her diabetes. She died while having a CAT Scan, one year to the month after my father died, four days after my son’s tenth birthday. An autopsy showed pancreatic cancer.
Stories, like these, haunt me, still . . .
Two days after the unexpected death of my father, I had to take my mother to a specialist for an appointment. I asked the nurses at reception if they would take her in right away so that I could take her home. They refused. We waited three hours while my mother shut out the crowded waiting room by closing her eyes.
These were the same “nurses” who, on a previous appointment, refused my mother (a diabetic) a glass of water when a heat wave made their over-crowded waiting room a hot stuffy place. Seniors everywhere were fanning themselves attempting to get air.
I suggested they should have a tray of water out, considering the conditions in the waiting room. The answer I got was, “What are we, waitresses?” They whispered wisecracks at each other throughout that two-hour wait.
On those days, in the presence of doctors and specialists and their staff, I would see that look on her face again – the embarrassment, the sense of hopelessness that I was working so hard to keep away.
So, once a month I would soak my mother’s feet in lavender-scented warm water. I would make her a salad with iceberg lettuce, cheese, tomatoes, ham, cucumbers and her favourite French dressing. I would turn on her soaps and I would trim her toenails. It was on one of those days when she said “I feel you’ve missed your calling because of me,” tears welling in her eyes.
Troy Media columnist Barbara Webb has over 15 years of life experience in a caregiver role. Are you a caregiver? Barbara would like to hear your story. Contact her at familyties@troymedia.com.