2022 Family Caregiving Time Records - Mar - 2024 01 24


 This was our fifth month since bringing Mom home Nov 1, 2021. We were still nursing her through the COPD exacerbation that almost took her life in December. She had quit smoking. We were giving her extra puffer medication to help with her breathing.

I was still trying to work full time and manage Mom's caregiving at home. My vision that the second bedroom in Mom's suite would be occupied by a rotation of siblings staying over with Mom was not realistic. I was the only one staying overnight with Mom. 

We continued to work on trying to figure out a workable arrangement for caregiving. Home Support would provide 2 hours a week respite care as part of their service offering. In this month we started a schedule of external paid in-home caregiving that included light housekeeping. We also now had a regular schedule of Home Support caregivers coming in six days a week to provide personal care (sponge bath and weekly shower/shampoo). This meant, on any given day, I would have at least 1 person coming and going. On some days, there were as many as 5 or 6 different people coming and going from Mom's suite. Each of these people, incoming and departing, needed to be greeted and bade farewell. 

In the month of March, there were 86 time record entries, that is, there were 86 transitions, almost three everyday. There were six days when I was alone with Mom for a full 24 hour shift. That meant there were 80 transitions on the remaining 25 days, or an average of more than three comings and goings on any given day.

We were trying to establish a caregiving schedule routine, but the fact of the situation was that we had never done this before, we had never done this with each other before, and we had to keep making adjustments to see what would work.

During this month we also experimented with putting the laundry out to an external service to see if that would make a significant improvement to the work of running our caregiving facility. This did not last long, it proved too much trouble to coordinate yet another pick up and delivery, over and above coordinating and managing the caregiving schedule while trying to get enough time to do my paid work.


During this month I was on active caregiving duty 616.50 hours, 83% of the total caregiving hours for that month. The 35 hours provided by our paid external provider accounted for only 4.7% of the total caregiving time. The 2 hours a week provided by Home Support for respite accounted for less than 1% of that time.

I did not know it then, but clearly I was in a situation that was not going to be successful if the demands on my time were not substantially relieved.

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