Mary Ann Boor could see her husband’s Alzheimer’s disease
progressing, and her responsibilities as his caregiver intensifying.
For years, David Boor had carefully taken diabetes
medications. But as he grew forgetful, Mary Ann Boor had to start monitoring
the doses and timing. She took over the driving and then the finances; she had
to begin helping him bathe and dress.
اضافة اعلان
The Boors, retired high school teachers who moved to a
lakefront retirement home in Huron, Ohio, were managing on their own. “Then,
about the time I thought maybe I should look into home health aides, the
pandemic struck and I was leery of people coming into the house,” Mary Ann
Boor, 71, recalled.
Her husband, 72, was a cancer survivor, she said, and “I
didn’t feel I could take the chance, expose him to something that could be so
serious.”
Through the many surges of COVID-19, several forms of
support fell away. Mary Ann Boor’s yoga studio, a frequent refuge, shut down.
Friends and relatives who occasionally kept David Boor company, giving his wife
a few hours’ break, couldn’t come. Her sleep suffered.
“It certainly put some additional burdens on me,” she said.
“I was always thinking about ‘What if he gets sick?’ Or ‘What would happen if I
became ill?’ That scared me even more.”
Most older Americans who need help with the so-called
activities of daily living — bathing, dressing, eating, using a toilet — don’t
receive any kind of paid care, at home or in-care facilities. They rely on
unpaid family caregivers.
Now, early research is showing how those caregivers
struggled through 2020, as the pandemic made an already stressful job tougher.
A study recently published in The Gerontologist, comparing
576 family caregivers to nearly 3,000 non-caregivers, found significantly
higher rates of anxiety, depression and disturbed sleep among the caregivers
(whose average age was 59), most of whom were caring for people over 65.
The caregivers also reported less social interaction and
more worries about finances and food, even after controlling for factors such
as income and employment.
“The pandemic has exacerbated things,” said Scott Beach, a
social psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh and lead author of the
study. “It impacted everybody, but it impacted caregivers more.”
The online survey, conducted in April and May 2020, found
disparate effects, as in many aspects of the
COVID crisis. “Female caregivers,
young caregivers, lower-income people and those providing more care — both
personal and medical care — all were worse off,” Beach said.
If they were caring for people with cognitive disabilities
such as dementia, or with behavioral and emotional problems, “they fared really
poorly,” he said.
At about the same time, Sung Park, a sociologist and
demographer at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, used
a nationally representative online panel to explore caregivers’ mental and physical
health. Her study distinguished between short-term caregivers, who had provided
assistance for a year or less, and those who had been in the role longer.
The findings, from nearly 4,800 respondents, showed that
while caregivers suffered more psychological distress and fatigue than
non-caregivers, the length of service made a pronounced difference. Long-term
caregivers had much higher rates of physical symptoms such as headaches, body
aches and abdominal discomfort.
The surges and shutdowns created a variety of problems for
caregivers, said Grace Whiting, president and CEO of the National Alliance for
Caregiving. Some, like Mary Ann Boor, were afraid to bring helpers into their
homes, paid or unpaid.
For others, as adult day centers and senior centers closed,
“the feeling of being alone, with no relief valve for the complex emotions that
come with caregiving, was amplified,” Whiting said.
Carol Brown moved from
Missouri back into her childhood home
in Livermore, California, in November 2019 to care for her 88-year-old mother,
who could no longer live alone safely.
Although Brown, 58, felt glad to be able to keep her mother
at home, “I cried a lot, watching my mother aging, feeling my own upheaval,”
she said. What helped was a twice-monthly caregiver support group whose
members, like her, were women caring for mothers with dementia.
“It was emotionally good to be with them,” Brown said.
“They’d all been through the wringer. And they were a font of information.”
She misses their support. With the pandemic, the group moved
online, but Brown found Zoom sessions unsatisfying and stopped participating.
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