In this episode, senior living expert, Valarie Cook, and Barb Fletcher, Stress Expert and co-host of the Less Stress in Life Podcast, talk about the stress of caregiving, and living in the "sandwich generation" of caring for kids and elderly parents at the same time.
Valarie Cook has been working in the Senior Care industry for 7 years working in both residential services and home care. She holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Management/Leadership from Northwood University and is working on her Doctorate.
Valarie is a member of the Council on Aging, Caregivers Resources Network, West Michigan Dementia Network, West Michigan Healthcare Network, a board member for the Wyoming/Kentwood Chamber, and Ambassador with the Grand Rapids Area Chamber. In her role with Samaritas Senior Living, Valarie helps bridge the gap between the medical community and residents, while also helping families and older adults to understand the amazing things that Samaritas Senior Living of Grand Rapids can do to help keep their loved one as independent as possible.
Barb Fletcher spent 35 years managing and supervising nursing homes in her province of New Brunswick, Canada. Now in an encore career as a Certified HeartMath Coach, Synergy Certified Stress Mastery Educator, a Licensed Independent Stress Mastery Associate and Certified HeartMath Trainer and Coach, she is her aging mother's primary caregiver.
In this episode, senior living expert, Valarie Cook, and Barb Fletcher, Stress Expert and co-host of the Less Stress in Life Podcast, talk about the stress of caregiving, and living in the "sandwich generation" of caring for kids and elderly parents at the same time.
Valarie Cook has been working in the Senior Care industry for 7 years working in both residential services and home care. She holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Management/Leadership from Northwood University and is working on her Doctorate.
Valarie is a member of the Council on Aging, Caregivers Resources Network, West Michigan Dementia Network, West Michigan Healthcare Network, a board member for the Wyoming/Kentwood Chamber, and Ambassador with the Grand Rapids Area Chamber. In her role with Samaritas Senior Living, Valarie helps bridge the gap between the medical community and residents, while also helping families and older adults to understand the amazing things that Samaritas Senior Living of Grand Rapids can do to help keep their loved one as independent as possible.
Barb Fletcher spent 35 years managing and supervising nursing homes in her province of New Brunswick, Canada. Now in an encore career as a Certified HeartMath Coach, Synergy Certified Stress Mastery Educator, a Licensed Independent Stress Mastery Associate and Certified HeartMath Trainer and Coach, she is her aging mother's primary caregiver.
You're listening to less stress in life. With hosts, Deb Timmerman and Barb Fletcher, we believe life with less stress and more energy is possible with the right tools, strategies and knowledge. So we bring your real conversations around the stress of relationships, money, and the daily hassles of life, with guests that will inspire, challenge, entertain, and motivate you to take action. Welcome to the Less Stress In Life podcast. Today, our format is going to be a little bit different than normal. I'm Debra Timmerman. And I'm going to be the moderator for this podcast, and my guests today are Barb Fletcher, who is normally my co host, and Valerie Cook. Valerie is an expert in senior care. And I'm going to just allow each of them to introduce themselves. So Val, would you like to call first please?
Valerie Cook:Sure. I'm Valerie Cook, I work at a senior living community that has all levels of care, independent all the way up to long term care, skilled nursing, memory care. And we of course, have assisted living, and like I said, independent as you would mean. So I've been in senior living for almost 10 years, in different facets, I've worked in home health care, private duty care, and then of course, communities with different levels of care. And it's also personal, I dealt with the grandma, which is how I hadn't got in this industry.
Deb Timmerman:And Barb, tell our listeners a little bit about your background.
Barb Fletcher:So I am in an encore career. My first career, I spent 35 years, in aged care, overseeing the nursing homes and funding regulating and monitoring in the province I live in, in New Brunswick, Canada. It was an honor to do that work. And so now, my new career is helping people with stress, but I understand the business that you're in, and I'm actually living some of those pressures today.
Deb Timmerman:So, Val, what's been the biggest change in how we transition in eldercare or aging since the pandemic?
Valerie Cook:There's a lot that's changed for obvious reasons. Everybody was told to shelter in place or stay home or, and all of that, and everybody took that to heart. So, that also happened in our community as well.People would normally progress through the process of aging within our continuum, which means moving through the different levels of care. And then also at home, right? independent, that's optional. As you're well aware, you don't have to move in here if you are independent, so no one was moving in, it's independent. And that's still turning in the case, there's a lot of hesitancy. So we're getting people who are interested in moving in at a much later stage in life at a level of care, which means they need something, right, they need some assistance, that sometimes it's so significant that they end up in long term care, which is unfortunate because they miss out on all of the wonderful things we do for our community members that are able to partake, such as outings and things like that. So yeah, it's a lot later than what it used to be. In homes where people are staying much longer, which means that families are doing a lot more than they used to.
Deb Timmerman:So as we start to look at this fall, opening up, and kids going back to school, and getting involved in extra curricular activities. How does that look for a person who is perhaps caregiving now and has an elder that is in a an assisted or a long term care? living arrangement? What What do you see happening for those elders? And what do you see happening with those caregivers?
Valerie Cook:So it's, it's, it's gonna be too much, right? It's, um, kids take a lot from us. We need you know, transportation and meaning they need love and nurturing and just like an older adult does. And then the older adult over the gradual last 16 to 16 to 18 months has taken more and more time from your day, which was fine at that time, right? There wasn't a whole lot going on. Let me get shipped, delivered and do all your groceries. But now it's a little different, right? So you've taken all this time, and you've helped your older adult. But you're now adding in all of the nuances of school returning to the way it needs to be for those children, and all those extracurricular activities that you talk of. How does that look? So, it's going to take more time, more steps, but there isn't more time. As an example, there's actually two generations going through this together. The baby, the younger baby boomers, and the younger Gen X ers are doing it at the same time, because you have different levels of necessity. It's really a very interesting timeframe. And how does this look, because there's a lot of guilt, that comes from them as well.
Deb Timmerman:And I think also a lot of maybe even pressure on the older adult, because they have come to depend on their family to be that social support during that time, and if they're moving in later, they probably are not making or haven't had been able to make those friendships that you normally do when you move into a new community.
Valerie Cook:True. I mean, that's 100% sure, there's so much that we do that. You can pick and choose if you want to stay in your apartment, you can, if you don't, you don't have to, there's always something to be active and engaged in. Heck, you know, half our residents drive and go where they want to go and do what they want to do and help babysit grandkids. But it's Yeah, you're missing out on a whole whole session. That would be so fun, and no other better terms or enjoyable. Because if you come in and you're relegated to an assistance that you need, you do, whittle down how many people you've seen in a day, because your ability to move out in community
Deb Timmerman:Barb, you have experienced some of this right now with your mom. So other listeners a little bit about what happened, what's your mom's story is.
Barb Fletcher:So my mom's a nurse, which adds another flavor to it all. And she's tried this a button. And she's living independently, but very complicated. Physically frail. And she's actually in hospital right. Now has been for eight weeks, and so, you know, the longer the duration, the the more troubling that becomes. But prior to that, we had wrapped a lot of services around her, you know, home support, I had hair care that came in. She had dog walker, she has a dog. And so every day somebody came and walked her dogs. So there were a lot of touches that came for her. Plus, I was blessed to be flexible enough with my work schedule that if I needed to play a different role, I could adjust, which is very different. And I can absolutely appreciate that, that if you're in the system, you're actually doing a Monday to Friday job or shift work, it's much more difficult to find that time to actually play that role. So now my schedule's a little bit different. I'm visiting the hospital regularly and taking calls because she's got her cell phone and she calls me often to update me today I got to participate in her menu ordering because I was telling her story, and so she just put me on hold while she ordered her menu for tomorrow. But I completely get it and you know, I wish that she might have considered something like this 10 years ago before she became so physically frail. Our objective is to care for her as long as we can at home. And she has some mean so we have options. And but it is it is a full time job, managing all the bits, getting all the errands addressed, and I'm not chasing after little ones.
Deb Timmerman:Then with all transparency, Barb has texted me a few times and used that "G" word. Haven't you Barb? I think it's a natural feeling that people have come up. You know, things don't go as planned and the expectations, or what you hope for. may not, they may not work out. And then there's the what ifs and all those scenarios that,go through your head. Val, when when you talk about guilt from that, from the caregivers perspective, how are they sharing those feelings with you? And what kind of support are you providing for them?
Valerie Cook:Well, we offer, you know, different classes throughout and different activities throughout the community. So, we're offering a class next week, on Saturday morning, intentionally, before your day really get started. So you don't have to pull away from something at 930 in the morning, in our community, for outside caregivers, or anyone who's feeling that push and pull up the guilt and not sure. They need ways, right to like navigate that and deal with that, naturally, you're teaching that class for me, and it's as a person who has witnessed it, and also has lived it and watched her mother go through it, guilt weighs heavy, you know, but I think sometimes you're seeing the forest through the trees, right? Like, what we're seeing is they don't see it, right. So an outside perspective, you're just, you're anxious, and you're running around like crazy, and you're trying to get everything done. And you don't see the stress that it's causing you because you've been in it for, I don't know, months, years, even, my mom was spending five hours a day, taking care of my grandmother who, walked independently, lived on her own independent apartment. But then she would drop her off for coffee with a friend single clean her apartment, put her laundry away, like organized her soup. And they never talked about it. Right? It wasn't like grandma acknowledged that she was declining. So, there's a lot of families out there who are knee deep in it, you know, and they just don't want to accept it. And honestly, moving someone into a community like ours should be actually a celebration, because they get to be as independent as they can be, or are. And you get to be the kid again. You get to be the daughter with the house with the grandkids to she wants to go over and have dinner, you know, and that's it.
Deb Timmerman:I spent my entire career as a nurse in elder care, either in long term care as a nurse or as a director of nursing, assistant director, and then hospice. And I think that I spent more time really connecting with the families whose loved ones were in our care, and doing exactly what you're talking about now, managing them through this very difficult process, and providing more supports to them in some cases, because we had a staff, social worker, and we had a chaplain, all of those wonderful help wraparound services inside that community. And when they left, they knew that we would communicate, when something was up, we would keep them abreast of things. And their loved one could call them. And it was really a win win situation. If you have a good partner, this can be a great transition. And as I get closer to that age 65 I'm going to be 64 I start thinking about now, if I have to transition, what is that going to look like for me? And do I want to direct that, or do I want to leave that decision to my kids and stepkids who will then have to do it, perhaps, when things go south, and they don't have as many choices as they do if they plan ahead.
Valerie Cook:Well, and that's, that's my biggest thing to you is I've preached this since I started working in senior care and nobody wants to make a decision reactionary, right. Like we're, we're a society of habit of doing things in a reactionary manner. But if we were proactive about it, we'd get to choose our destiny. So nobody wants to have mom or aunt or grandma fall and end up in the hospital. So that then they can't walk. Or they have to use a wheelchair or whatever that looks like and they don't have the mobility that they're used to. What could you imagine for them if you chose to make a safe decision for them? Or they moved into a community like ours before that situation occurred so that maybe just maybe it wouldn't occur so that they would enjoy the quality of life. On top of quantity that you want you want them to,
Deb Timmerman:We always ask our guests what's their best stress tip? And I think you just gave it for those people who have aging parents, and Barb as someone who has an aging parent, really nearing end of life. What is your best stress - less tip?
Barb Fletcher:Hmm, that's a good question. Well, I, I certainly practice building resilience every single day. And I even that sometimes isn't quite enough. And if it's not, then I need to go for a good solid walk and get my feet connected to the earth again. But I think it's also good to surround yourself by people who recognize, even though you might know quite a bit about stress might recognize in you that you're maybe not doing as well as you normally would. Because sometimes, we overlook even the obvious.
Deb Timmerman:Oh, that is so true. So true. So one of the things that I'm going to teach at Val's educationally event is that base technique for building resilience that Barb talked about. And one of the things that I hear from care givers all the time, is I'm so exhausted, I'm so tired. So if you can keep your internal energy and batteries up, that helps immensely. And we'll talk a little bit about how stress and being in that state of fatigue, how that clouds your decision making and how that affects all different areas of your life, and teach that base tool. Thank you both so much for being flexible and changing this format. I think it was a wonderful way to share some really rich and valuable experiences with our listeners. And we'll put the contact information for Val and Samaritas and for BB in our podcast notes. So feel free to reach out to either of them, or go to the less stress in life website and click on a message and we can get your direct to the right person. Thank you so much.
Barb Fletcher:Thank you.
Valerie Cook:Thanks.