Emotional Decline – The Tribulations

Stages of Decline Outline: Eleventh Installment

The totality of Cindy’s physical decline created some health and comfort problems for her care.  Without any emotional or verbal feedback these Tribulations required guesswork that added to the Trials of her emotional decline.

• Feeding Cindy could take as long as two hours because of her lack of focus while eating.
• Undetected food sitting in her gums for long periods led to advanced teeth decay.
• Failures to swallow liquids, saliva and mucus led to occasional coughing fits.
• Being confined to a hospital bed led to hot spots that increasingly took longer to heal.
• We dealt with constant turnover of the people assisting with Cindy’s care.
• So far I have spent more than 40% of my married life as a caregiver for relatives with dementia.

What is known as cognitive empathy allows one to compartmentalize sad emotions to focus dispassionately on what needs to be done for the care of another person.  This type of empathy has to replace emotional empathy for a caregiver to survive the emotional stage of decline and be effective.

You might think that with the list of Trials and Tribulations during this final stage of decline there could be no Triumphs, but there were.  In homage to our motto of living well in the face of adversity, I present the Triumphs next time as the final installment.

Please subscribe to be alerted when the video podcasts of this series come out.  Your subscription helps to draw search engine attention to these posts.