"Home Loving Senior Care" - Triad Home Health Care!

Home Loving Senior Care, providing the special heart warming homemaker aide services in Greensboro, High Point, Winston-Salem, Burlington, Graham, Mebane, and Hillsborough, NC with home health and elderly care services for Carolina family caregivers!

Our office hours are 9 am -2 pm, Monday - Friday. Please continue to call the office number if there is a problem even if the office is closed. If you do not get an answer call Judy on her cell phone 830-1070. We have a Fax number for the office now which is 996-6712

Today I want to share a wonderful story about a man who suffered for years with Crohn's disease and his wife who took care of him and taught him how to change his attitude about being sick. Ed and Zina had married in their early 20s and were full of the plans and dreams of all young couples. When Ed was 26, he developed Crohn's disease, a debilitating digestive track condition that can cause constant pain, weight loss due to severe limitations in eating habits and weakness.

There were times when Ed was close to dying and he would begin to say goodbye to Zina and tell her how much he loved her. Zina refused to give in to negative talk with Ed. She insisted that he would pull through and that she did not want to hear any farewells. Indeed he made it through all of his desperate times, but developed a negative attitude toward his illness and his life. He bemoaned the fact that our society spends millions of dollars - through books, television, the Internet - giving advice on how to be healthy. However, he had to learn how to be sick all on his own.

Ed was filled with rage and resentment which he often took out on other people such as his doctors, friends, his wife and even strangers on the street. People who loved him learned when to be supportive and when to leave Ed alone.

Ed's wife knew that she needed to help him change his attitude or her life as caregiver would be unbearable. Ed, himself, was miserable with the way he had become. He needed to stop fighting himself and the world because none of his actions made the disease or his life any better. Finally, Zina arranged for them to travel to Alaska where Ed grew up to help him reconnect with the natural landscape that he loved. This trip allowed Ed to step back from his path of destruction and begin to figure out how he wanted to live his life in the present. In a quiet moment in the Alaskan wildness, Zina offered him the choice of continuing to resent the illness or to figure out who is he is now and to learn to appreciate all that he does have instead of what was missing or hurting. He went alone to Cook Inlet at the Gulf of Alaska and began to let it all go - his fears, the anger, sadness and the loss of his early dreams.

He realized that the more attention he paid to the life around him, the more he enjoyed everything from nature scenes to interaction with his loved ones. Zina helped him to see that there were even benefits from his illness as it taught him to slow down, to make everything matter, to focus on what was happening in the moment. Ed spent a good deal of time trying to make up for how miserably he had treated some of his friends and family. They graciously accepted his apologies and became even more supportive.

The message here is that caregivers can play an important role in helping their loved ones to learn how to be sick and how to make the most of their current lives. Change is possible in even the most difficult of circumstances.

Dr. Amy, The Caregivers' Coach