How often do you hear stories about parents failing health causing falls or worse rushes to hospital emergency. The levels of stress and emotional upset these events create are intense. There is a drop everything call-to-arms and we all rally around to wait and see what happens next.
Does this sound familiar? Are you having these events happen with alarming frequency? How can you stop the knee jerk reaction when it is so instinctive.
Let me tell you, when you are a family caregiver you are also the pint person who everyone relies on for information decisions and more importantly primary in person care. This is what happened to us when first my MIL had a bad fall. We rushed to emergency and the telephone calls started.
What is happening? How is she? Is it life threatening? Who is with her? Those are typically, the first questions.
After that first rush, it’s, hurry up and wait for medical professionals to take their time to assess and give advice. Talk to the next of kin preferably the authorized decision maker. The team then makes a plan for care and release after care.
Is this sounding familiar?
So how do you plan for something like this? Does a plan need to exist? Will having a plan reduce the stress of the emergency?
It’s always an option to create a plan ahead of time. It allows you to know clearly what actions to take based on a decision made during a less stressful time. When you are stressed you react with a more instinctive part of your brain based on the feelings that your distressed thoughts are triggering. The action you take during this moment will inevitably be different.
When we are in situations, we think are traumatic or life threatening we tend to feel fear, frustration, out of control and consequently we often lash out at caregivers and alienate the very people we want helping us.
What if instead, we knew exactly what our plan was. We knew that in this traumatic situation we decided that the person is in the very best possible hands and we are there to support that team and our loved one. This thinking can create a feeling of calm and we then behave in a more collaborative way with caregivers and the result is that everyone is more productive less stressed and the experience overall is more positive. Nobody ever plans for traumatic events, we never really want that to happen but statistically it is inevitable, and this stuff happens all the time. Why not be prepared with a plan ahead of time and practice remembering the way you want to think and feel when the emergency happens.
“Remember we taught our kids the emergency fire exit plan to avoid panic”.
This is just another version of the same. If you want to know more about having a plan book now and see if coaching is right for you.