Arlene, cont'd

Angela & her great-grandmother, Edna

Well, shortly after that, I finally realized that something had to be done. I love my mother so much, we all do, I can't really can't speak for my other family members, but for myself. I just love my mother so much; we had so much going with each other, we took a lot of trips together, we always did things together. So I was willing to sacrifice my employement and take care of her fulltime if I could. And I got together with my family, and we realized she was ready to come home after three months in the hospital, we realized she was ready to come home, and it was up to us whether we wanted to take care of her here at home, and we were all adament on taking care of her here. So we all went through training on how to take care of her, how to take care of her personal needs, exercising, tranfering her from bed to the chair, from the chair to the car, just everything. So, I did that, I got my brother and sister together and we decided to take care of her here at home.

There's only three of us; my sister, my brother and me. I had initially told my family members that we will each take one month out of our time to take care of her. So we did that. The first 6 or 8 months we went one month at a time. I said, I'll go first, I'll take care of her first, the first month it will be me. And that was in December and I was willing to take care of her, and not have anything to do with Christmas or anything. And then my sister came in the next month and then my brother the next month.

As time went I we realized that that was just a little too much, because you do get burned out. It was a lot -- she wasn't as well as she is now -- and it took a lot of our time, and a lot of just tending to her needs day and night, 24 hours. So after we were kind of tired, I said, ok, let's get back together and let's have another meeting and we'll decide how to take care of this. What do you recommend? And they just left it up to me, and I said ok, how about two weeks at a time? I'll take care of her two weeks, day and night, weekends, and then someone else will take over. And that's how we planned it, and it worked well.

This went on until June, just a couple months ago, my sister and I had an argument. And she said, ok, you go ahead and take care of mom, and I said, OK, I will. So now I'm taking 4 weeks at a time, and my brother is doing two weeks. Since I don't have any little children, I feel like I can take the full four weeks, and my brother can take the two weeks of his time, because he's got all these little kids.

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