Burned out and depressed.

I have to add . . . .

I would be the first one to say that no one deserves sympathy for making a martyr out of themself and then whining about it.

Tomorrow I'm going to ask the hospice agency for some nurse's aid visits. I have to delegate some of the hands-on care. My arm and heel are sore to the point of soon being disabling.

Hey Rose76. Just passing by to say hello and goodbye. This site has been very helpful to me over the years but I will be moving on. You and yours will be in my prayers. God bless.

Yesterday I ran out of gas, figuratively. I have let everything go. The apt is a mess. I have to pull myself together.

I feel nauseated. Mostly it's mental.

Thanks for the hugs. I'm depressed.

I'm not taking care of my responsibilities. He's neglected all morning.

I guess the remedy is to get up and do what should be done . . . even though I feel like I don't care.

I don't quite understand the purpose of a post like this. It seems nice enough. But I don't quite get it.

?

I feel at the end of my rope. My sleep/wake cycle is all screwed up. I did fall asleep last night for awhile. But now I've been awake for a few hours. It's just after 5:30 a.m.

I don't know how I'm going to cope. I don't know how I'm going to take care of this man today. But I don't see an alternative.

I'm getting really screwed up.

Caring for my S.O. is almost physically beyond me. My right arm is very sore from rendering care that gets more and more difficult due to his mobility impairment getting more severe. I don't know what I can do about it. The nursing homes around here are dumps. So I just carry on. I'm doing less. It's hard to cook. It's hard to wash dishes and clean up after meals. But I have to feed him. I have to keep him clean. So the arm and tendonitis in my left heel just get worse and worse.

I'm getting depressed because I don't know what to do.

I'm getting agitated and panicky. I've got to come up with a plan to deal with things. I don't see any good options.

Rose, have you tried signing up to Nextdoor, the neighborhood app, and seeing if anyone nearby can help with grocery shopping or anything? In my neighborhood, all of us able-bodied are offering to grocery shop, dog walk, whatever for the mobility impaired and seniors who need it.

My Nextdoor is too.

Thank you both for posting. I'm doing so awful. My arm got worse. Through Medicaid we have attendants who comes by. But I let the attendant go shopping because doing the hands-on care of my S.O. is just too hard.

Going to WalMart or Sam's is my main recreation. I like to go and walk around the stores. So I would use the attendant as a sitter, while I went to the store. But my S.O. is sicker and harder to care for. The attendants seem to dread having to move him or lift him. They don't seem to have any kitchen skills either. So I stay with him and do everything that's hard. I bring him to the bathroom. I move him from the wheelchair to the toilet. I shower him. I give the incontinence care. He can barely stand for a few seconds. He can be tough to get cooperation from. So I let them get away with half-doing easy stuff. They are a lot younger than I am. I sent one to the laundromat yesterday. She spent 5 hours doing who-knows-what. She takes off on an errand and uses up all her time staying out of the apartment where I'm doing the hard work gets done. I'm being made a fool of. They don't even get him shaved with the electric shaver, unless I specifically request that. I tried making a list for them to refer to. It gets ignored.

Now I've gotten very depressed and I'm not doing the dishes after dinner. I hate for one of them to get here and find the place not picked up. It embarrasses me. It's a very small apartment. We can't be in here all 3 of us. My plan was to go off and be out of the apt, while someone was here. But they seem to hate being left here in a caregiving role. He's courteous to them. But to get him up from his chair is heavy lifting. That's why I'm so sore.

I'm rattling away, probably making no sense. Right now I really need a mental health support worker to help me face things I've neglected - like piles of unooened mail and a bedroom that is so cluttered it's unuseable. I've developed a mental block against tackling the disorder. It's embarrassing.

I have to put him to bed now.

So I tucked him in. I vented a lot of my miserableness at him. He ended up saying "Then why don't you get the eff out of here?" That's actually a fair response for him to make. Some will think "Oh, poor abused Rose." But it's not fair for me to mope around, whining what a martyr I am. No one's holding a gun to my head. I'm complaining about things that he doesn't control. He tried being nice to me. He said he hoped I'ld feel better tomorrow. He agreed the attendants don't help as much as their job description states they should. But nothing he said would satisfy me. I was taking a bath in resentment and self-pity. I plunged headlong into a depressive pit.

The hospice agency will pay for him to go 5 days into a nursing home to give me "respite." Of course, now is a particularly awful time to opt for that. The nursing home just undoes my hard work. He'll come out with rashes and a urinary tract infection. And he'll lose weight. And getting him into a facility is a lot of work for me. He'll share a room and a bathroom with someone else, who may not be too clean. We're in a poor state. The nursing homes here are crappy.

It is true that he's not the most appreciative of persons. I am taken for granted. That's how he is and always has been. What I do is a lot to do for someone who is basically a taker. He can be warm and sweet toward me, but only after he has gotten what he wants out of me. I know not to expect different. He can't change who he is. Neither can I.

So I've gotten depressed. Resentment/bitterness will do that to you.

This micro-drama goes on against the background of the Corona pandemic. It starts to feel unreal.

I tell myself to remember that depressive episodes blow over. They always have.

Some of my problem is spiritual, rather than psychological. Embracing resentment is a failure of character, I believe.

I'm finally making dinner quite late in the evening. I've told my S.O. ghat he has to help me make this caregiving job I do a little easier. I have physical pain from the physical demands and I've become depressed. I'm falling in and out of serious depression. Everyone in the nation faces an abnormal level of stress. I don't mean to say my lot in life is so awful. Objectively, I have blessings to be thankful for. But, right now, awful is how I feel. I keep breaking down crying.

Mornings are bad. I get him up, give him some breakfast, and I go back to bed. I stay in bed feeling apathetic. Sometimes I don't get dressed till 3 or 4 p.m. This is depression. It's miserable.

I'm making dinner. It will be ready at 10:30 p.m. He just asked me, "What's holding up the effin dinner?"

I try to explain that I'm very depressed. He doesn't know what I'm talking about.

I keep getting better, only to fall into the black tar pit again.

I'm a bit surprised you "get better" at all given the situation. Does anything precipitate or characterize these better times?

I just get so sick of everything going to heck that I start to try to pull things together. Once I get some of the mess straightened out - like the dishes getting washed - I feel encouraged, and I tackle somerhing else. This builds momentum and I keep going. Order starts to replace the mess around me, and I feel better.

I'm determined and kind of stubborn. I keep thinking I can make a situation work. Howeved, "given the situation" that I'm in, that's hoping for a lot. Still, I have made it work for a number of years. So that convinces me that I can keep on doing this. I figure that it's just a matter of pulling myself together and continuing to try.

But I keep falling intoi a pit mentally.

We no longer have any attendant coming in to help with caring for my bf. It's getting to be tougher. My right upper arm has been sore for a few months. Yesterday it spread up around my right shoulder and even to the right end of my collar bone. So yesterday I did less, even to the point of neglecting him. I got worse depressed. If not for COVID-19, I would ask our hospice provider to provide me with a period of "respite," which would mean moving my bf to a nursing home for 5 days. Now I feel I've lost that option, and I feel trapped. I could still do it, but it would be risky. One nursing home near us already had a breakout of COVID illness among staff and patients.

I took pain pills (hydrocodone) and I will go do his morning care now. Then I have to catch up on housework, like a kitchen strewn with dirty dishes. We've been snapping at each other. Mainly it's me getting very irritable with him. I have to calm down.

I know lots of people are under way worse stress than I'm under. I tell myself to keep that in mind and act responsibly. Yesterday and last night, I got to where I was acting and talking just awful. I better go start.

Im like Sisyphus. I never give up hope. Its like when people say, "i may be 71, but i FEEL 17!" So you feel 17 for a while, then 71 takes over. Rinse, repeat.