I’ve been noticing that I have developed a fear of doctors and medical offices when it comes to taking care of my own health.
I guess sitting in an office with the doctor who was giving the results of my husband’s dire diagnosis was not helpful. He was yelling at us that we needed to leave town immediately for Seattle to start treatment because it was that bad!
From there it was all the late night emergencies where I had to drive my husband in the middle of the night to the ER in a strange city and in the middle of Covid. I almost wasn’t allowed to be with him in the ER. Then getting lost in the big city trying to drive back to our apartment alone because my husband had to be admitted. It was stressful.
Then it was waiting on all the results of the bone marrow biopsies- so far 8 or 9. Also waiting for all the blood test results every week to see what all the cells were doing.
It does a number on your head. I’m beginning to fear that my own health may not be good. I have to go in and get checked out but it’s creating quite a bit of anxiety.
I know I need some counseling and I have had plenty before.
Anyway it’s another issue that just complicates everything.
The LAST thing anyone needs in a stressful situation is to be yelled at.
You do need to talk to someone about what is going on. Someone that you can open up to, express your fears to without judgement.
Call YOUR doctor. Make an appointment if you need to. Explain the situation and ask that they refer you to a therapist. You might even want to contact the American Cancer Society and see if they could refer you to someone or a Support Group that might be helpful. Talking to people that KNOW what you are going through helps a lot.
Unfortunately so many caregivers put off their own appointments because they are are busy caring for someone else. You can not afford to do that, what happens to him if you get sick? Who cares for both of you?
(and 2 years of delayed appointments because of COVID makes making an appointment even more difficult. {just a side note to show how delayed...., I had surgery in January and my "post op" appointment has been changed again until June 21!})
Yeah Covid has made things really difficult. When my husband was having complications- couldn’t get him in to see someone for a colonoscopy. It was at least a month out. I had to force my husband into the ER and then they were able to do the procedure the next day. Good thing he was seen because he was having a good case of graft vs host disease which can be lethal if left unchecked and even when they are monitoring it- it can still take out a person.
I am going to get myself checked out
but I’m hoping I can get a therapy session in before I have to do it because it won’t be easy. My friends tell me they give their burdens to God to get them through difficult times. I have been and will be doing that every single day. Thanks for your response.
When I met my biological family in 2000, I was diagnosed with PTSD afterward. And I hadn't even met them in person yet, just over the phone! Paxil helped me tremendously, by the way.
PTSD can come about from a wide variety of situations, including an anxiety provoking caregiving situation that's gone on for a long period of time! I have a good friend who's suffering from this exact situation and medicated for it by her PCP.
There is also something called CPTSD or Chronic PTSD which you should Google and read about; it's associated with chronic, ongoing trauma vs a single event that leads to PTSD.
Definitely see your doctor to talk about this situation in further detail.
Best of luck!
I am extremely sensitive- actually I’ve been called an Empath. I think the stuff I’ve been through with my husband- it really has affected me.
I’ve been taking something called Rescue Remedy and something called Calm by Highland and they have worked wonders and they have kept me from freaking out.It’s all homeopathic. Plus I’m heavily into qigong practice - been taking many workshops and working with a qigong master. Also doing something called EFT. Everything has helped to a certain degree but it’s been nice to get the support of all of you. That has really helped too so thank you!
I see your point. But psychiatrists make many mistakes as well, mis-diagnosing a lot (throughout history and now too). We shouldn’t have too much faith in them.
And some things (like feeling traumatized, worried, stressed) are common sense. You don’t need a doctor to tell you, you’ve been traumatized, etc.
Some non-medical people are wiser than medical people: not only about the correct diagnosis, but the correct/good way out of it.
Anyway I tried to make an
appointment to see a doc for a checkup but there will be a delay because I’m a new patient and I have to have my records sent. I also signed up for an online therapist. We will see how that works. I wanted to see a somatic therapist because I’ve done talk therapy and EMDR and frankly it didn’t do a whole lot for me so I wanted to try a different approach.
Thanks for letting me unload. It’s been helpful.
Those who had provided caregiving had IL-6 levels significantly higher for individuals of the same age who hadn't cared for someone.
This addresses the new nomenclature:
"PTSD and DSM-5
In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association revised the PTSD diagnostic criteria in the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5; 1). PTSD is included in a new category in DSM-5, Trauma- and Stressor-Related Disorders. All of the conditions included in this classification require exposure to a traumatic or stressful event as a diagnostic criterion."
https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/treat/essentials/dsm5_ptsd.asp
I have also read that it's referred to not as PTSD but PTSS (Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome), which makes sense b/c it seems to function more as a syndrome than a disorder. I would argue that this kind of experience, just like that in wartime, isn't a syndrome; it's more of a body's response to conditions for which we never really acclimated. I yield, however, to those with medical and/or psychiatric experience.
One of the very interesting aspects of the earlier literature was the comparison of IL-6 in noncaregiving individuals to those who had cared for someone for a significant length of time.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC166443/
" Caregivers' average rate of increase in IL-6 was about four times as large as that of noncaregivers." and
"These data provide evidence of a key mechanism through which chronic stressors may accelerate risk of a host of age-related diseases by prematurely aging the immune response." (kind of scary, isn't it?)
and
"A growing body of evidence has implicated caregiving as a risk factor for health. Compared with noncaregivers, men and women who provide care to a spouse with a stroke or dementia report more infectious illness episodes (1), they have poorer immune responses to influenza virus and pneumococcal pneumonia vaccines (2–4), their wounds heal more slowly (5), they are at greater risk for developing mild hypertension (6, 7), and they may be at greater risk for coronary heart disease (8). Moreover, a prospective longitudinal study found that the relative risk for all-cause mortality among strained caregivers was 63% higher than noncaregiving controls (9)." (Numbers in parentheses refer to citations in the article.
This addresses only spousal caring for those with stroke or dementia; there are obviously a lot of other caregiving situations besides these two.
Not good; we caregivers have to take extra special care of ourselves.
Also this:
“we caregivers have to take extra special care of ourselves.”
I’ll add:
In fact the less you care, the “better off” you are: financially, emotionally, physically.
The more heartless you are, the better you’ll do in this world. Stepping on others, getting richer; selfishly just thinking about your own life.
But:
We’ll all prove them wrong. As someone else posted: let’s show them it’s not a disadvantage to be kind: let’s “win” against the jerks of the world.
I would never have been strong enough to be in home caregiver to anyone 24/7, but I did manage my brother's Trust as Trustee and I was his POA. Just getting all of that together from half the state away made me so anxious I thought my eye tic was permanent. I was jumpy. I was afraid. And I will be so honest as to say it has, at 80, left me less strong. I learned a lot. I did a great job, and now it is over. I can recognize and appreciate that, BUT, it has made me a bit more "fearful" of everything from airline flights (which I had cancelled until I thought I'd go nuts) of finances and documentation, of loss of my partner and what that would mean. To say nothing of the tech that keeps passing us by as we age. It has in some ways made me stronger, but in some ways there is--just as you observed--a PTSD that persists.
I wish you the best and my heart goes out to you.
(And here's just how nutty it can get. Sometimes I lay in bed awaiting sleep saying "spell world backwards" or "subtract by 7s from 100", and etc. Hee hee. It is both funny and NOT).
Your comment about "the tech that keeps passing us by as we age" caught my eye. I have been trying since January to purchase a new laptop which I absolutely need. After a TON of research, I finally bought a new one at a major retailer and was so excited to turn it on so I wouldn't have to keep borrowing one from a library. I never got to first base, meaning it simply wouldn't turn on -- and this was from one of the two major manufacturers of laptops. The retailer refused to give me back my total purchase price -- they wanted to keep $300 -- but after a major 3-month battle which involved dozens of pages of documents faxed to my bank, accusing the retailer of fraud, I finally prevailed. (I'm still using a borrowed laptop from the library). Smartphones are another story -- and we need these, like the computer, for medical related questions/appointments, etc. I'll not go into my experience in that realm but I'll just say this, again based on personal experience: you have to be VERY cautious in putting any new software on your phones (aka "software updates"). If you're unsure of what the update will do to the phone, or whether your phone is new enough to handle the update, just say no.