Recently I had a conversation with our family GP. “Why do you take all the complex patients?”,
I asked. “You are amazing - I’ve heard
you advocating on the phone for frail seniors who have no one else and when
other GPs turned our family down because Nick is too complex, you said
YES. Why do you say yes when other doctors say no?” He shrugged.
“I’m OK with uncertainty, I guess.”
I could have hugged him.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that short conversation and
what it means to me. Of course I’m
grateful for our wonderful family physician.
I wonder if we shouldn’t be offering a course in embracing uncertainty
to all prospective family doctors – and maybe to family caregivers, too. And I’m thinking about my own feelings about
uncertainty. Am I OK with it?
To be honest, I hate it.
In the driver’s seat is where I want to be and if others are driving, I
want them to handle the wheel MY way.
And that’s the crux. So I can understand those doctors who turned us down, I really can (even though I find it infuriating). It's hard being OK with uncertainty. In caregiving, we want to be in control, yet
so much of caregiving is uncontrollable.
We believe that we can live our own life and the life of our loved one
too. Any other approach feels dangerous
and even possibly life threatening. Hasn’t
every caregiver worried, “What will happen if I look away… if I become
distracted?”
I’m not referring to urgent situations where taking total
control is required – or when we must relinquish all of our control to an
emergency health care team. I’m talking
about long-term care, when care is given and received continually over months
and years. I’m talking about the voice
in the caregiver head that says, “this
is the way the care must be done”. When
others offer to help but perform care and homemaking duties differently, it
feels unhelpful and for some, even intolerable.
Because any other way destroys the illusion that life has changed from
the way it used to be. Any other way is
imperfect.
I am guilty. I admit
it – I have suffered the anxiety of the perfectionist in the midst of my son’s
highly volatile health care needs. I
have tried my best to morph the uncontrollable into something under my strict
command. It didn’t work and I just made
myself unhappy and resentful.
I learned the hard way that letting go of control and making
peace with uncertainty is the key to feeling relaxed and even happy most of the
time. There are various names for this
trick of the mind; some call it ‘giving it to God’, while others might say they
‘live only in the moment’. Putting out
the welcome mat for uncertainty doesn’t mean giving up on excellence in
caregiving. But it does mean that
excellence in caregiving doesn’t necessarily lead to excellent outcomes in your
loved one’s health. Accepting that
random and unknown elements can factor in to how things happen in life is the
key for me.
So, I still make meticulous plans and I still watch my loved ones very, very
carefully. But I know that whatever
course of action I think is best may turn out to be wrong – I accept that I
cannot know the future. I know that I do
my best and that my best is good enough.
My shoulders are down and I can smile, confident that I am imperfect.
Post-script: This blog post was a reflection on the terrific podcast 'Letting Go - A Valuable Lesson in Family Caregiving' on the Caregiving Network.
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