Today is July 24th, the International Day of Self-Care! To help you celebrate, Family Caregivers of BC has created self-care resources that you can use not only today, but any day of the year. Self-Care, self-awareness, and resiliency are related! One of the key ways to build resilience is to focus on taking care of […]
Managing Expectations
Boundary setting for family caregivers
“Sure Mom, I’ll help.” As soon as I spoke the words, my internal thought was, “I do not have time or energy for this! Why did I agree to help?” Sometimes we just say yes automatically. We feel emotionally tied to a situation or we feel an enormous amount of guilt and before we even think what […]
Dementia vs. Alzheimers
Many caregivers ask, “What’s the difference between dementia and Alzheimer’s disease?” Dementia is an umbrella term that refers to the many different types of dementia. Alzheimer’s Disease is the most common type of dementia, accounting for approximately 64% of all cases in Canada. Other types of dementia include vascular dementia, Pick’s Disease, Lewy-Body and Creutzfeldt-Jakob […]
Loss and grief are part of caring for someone with Alzheimer’s
With trepidation, I enter the long-term care facility. Bounding up a flight a stairs, I pause before opening the door to the second floor. The pause is two-fold. I need to search my memory bank for the code to enter the special care unit and secondly, to take a deep breath as I prepare myself […]