One of the most important things I've learned about caregiving over the years, from when I helped my mom out when she was my dad's caregiver, and now that I'm her caregiver, is that set daily routines are pretty important for all parties involved.
We don't have it down to an exact science, but outside of the days when we have doctor appointments, ours are pretty routine, from what we do in the morning to get ready for the day to what our gameplan is for lunch to how we plan on spending the evenings.
Every situation is different, of course, but it's essential for my mom and me to have the setup this way. We both remember things better, and it cuts down on the stress of her having to remind me of something or me having to remind her of something she needs to do.
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Needless to say, while it's a system that works, it also can get tedious for us both. So, occasionally, usually once every other week or so, we try to do something different. For instance, we'll go buy lunch and then drive to an area in Charlotte that has waterfront parking, where we can sit in the car, roll the windows down if it's cool, and eat lunch and watch the water and goings on.
Or we'll go to the Dairy Queen and buy ice cream and take a drive down Charlotte streets, though a drive in this city these days would test the patience of a saint.
It's when we're out and about doing things like that, I think to myself how I'd love to take mom into a restaurant for a meal. Or to have her go shopping with me using one of those motorized carts you see in stores.
The motorized carts make her nervous, so she won't do that, but she's told me often how she would love to go to this restaurant or that one, and while I nod to her, my thought process is bubbling about the logistics.
As her caregiver, I've told myself that certain things would have to be in place in order to do that.
We'd have to go somewhere where she didn't have far to walk from the parking lot to where we'd be seated in the restaurant. The dining establishment would have to have seating that would be fairly easy for her to get up from.
And the handicap bathroom stalls would need to be more functional than that awful situation we found ourselves in at the hospital last year where we came across a HRINO: Handicap Restroom in Name Only, where I couldn't fit the hospital wheelchair into the stall had to end up helping her up because the toilet wasn't handicap height.
Fortunately, my mom can still walk. She uses a walker, and walks around the house and to the car and back with no issues, and also to many doctor appointments and visits to my sisters' houses. But when we go to places where the walk is going to be lengthy (like the DMV) or we otherwise don't know what to expect, we bring the transport chair along to make it less tiresome and stressful for her.
We've had the transport chair for over two years now, and I'm almost embarrassed to admit that it was only within the last few weeks or so that it dawned on me that I could take mom to some of these restaurants using the transport chair, provided they had tables where the chair arms fit underneath (something I assume most places have at this point).
When I brought this up to her and suggested one day in the near future we could pick a restaurant she'd really been wanting to go to and bring the transport chair along with us, her face lit up.
Needless to say, we'll be doing that soon, but this is really going to require me to step out of my caregiver comfort zone. It likely will be just the two of us going (unless one of my sisters happens to be visiting), and I'm not going to feel comfortable leaving her alone in the event I have to step away from the table for whatever reason because I worry about kids being kids or people who have bad intentions when it comes to the elderly and handicapped.
I can "control" the environment to a certain extent if we're at home eating or in the car or at my sisters' or friends' houses. But I have a lot less control of the dynamics in a restaurant.
Not that I'm a control freak, but I'm very protective of my mom, and I am likely to go Cujo if someone ever tried to hassle her. And if she somehow got hurt while we were out trying to enjoy ourselves, I don't think I'd be able to forgive myself because she's worked so hard to be able to stay mobile.
Pretty much everything we do is with that thought in mind because once my dad was no longer mobile, we couldn't take care of him anymore and had to leave it up to the nursing home, and we lost him two months later. I want us to do everything we can to prevent that situation from happening to Mom.
So we're going to do the dine-in thing at the restaurant because I know it would make her happy and would remind her of what things were like before things went topsy-turvy in 2022 when we lost my dad and she was diagnosed with Stage IIIB colon cancer four months later.
In other words, it will give her - and me - a sense of normalcy neither of us has felt much since the post-2022 "new normal" became a thing. Incorporating elements of the "old normal" into the "new normal" is going to be a challenge but worth it, I think.
READ MORE: To take a look at my previous Caregiver's Diary entries, please click here.
