In this episode of Caregiver Conversations, hosts Kristie King and Antonia Harbin-Lamb welcome Stacey Gray, an Investment Manager at CIBC Private Wealth Management and a dedicated caregiver for her mother. Stacey shares her deeply personal journey of balancing work, education, and caregiving, especially during the challenges brought on by COVID-19. Stacey discusses the impact of the pandemic on her family dynamics and her mother's health, particularly her dementia. She provides insights into the emotional and practical aspects of caregiving during a global crisis and shares valuable lessons learned from her experience. Listeners will hear about the programs and services that supported Stacey through her caregiving journey and how she managed to maintain her own health and professional commitments. Stacey offers advice for caregivers facing similar challenges and reflects on the resilience and strength required to navigate such demanding roles. Join us for a heartfelt conversation filled with insights, reflections, and practical tips for caregivers navigating through crisis situations.
Kristie: Welcome to Caregiver Conversations, where we explore the challenges and triumphs of caregiving with compassion and expertise. I'm Kristie King, Executive Director of the Southeast Michigan Senior Regional Collaborative.
Antonia: And I'm Antonia Harbin Lamb, a staff attorney with the Elder Law and Advocacy Center, a division of Neighborhood Legal Services Michigan. Today, we're honored to have Stacey Gray join us. Stacey is an investment manager at CIBC Private Wealth Management and a dedicated caregiver for her mother. Welcome to the show, Stacey.
Stacey: Thank you so much, Kristie. I'm happy to be here.
Kristie: Welcome, Stacey. Well, you know, I am super excited to finally have this conversation with you. We know each other outside of this podcast space, and just in our daily interactions around health and fitness, conversations took place around getting to know one another. Our gym discussions just kind of led us to talk about life, and those casual conversations led me to learn about you and your journey with caregiving. So thank you again for agreeing to be a little vulnerable and to share your journey. With that in mind, I'm going to allow you, Stacey, to talk to the listeners a little bit about yourself and your mom prior to starting your caregiver journey.
Stacey: Well, we were all born and raised here in Detroit. My mom was just a super smart woman. She had a number of degrees, including a Ph.D. She was very tech-savvy, so even at 85, she had two computers, paid all her bills online, and played games online. She was super active, played golf all the time, walked every day, did Pilates at home—she had a reformer at home—and played bridge with her friends. She was really involved with my niece and her early education, and of course, college also. It never occurred to us, and I think I mentioned this to you, Kristie, that we would ever be caregivers. I just thought she would live to a hundred and then die peacefully. But she got COVID in 2020 at 85, and that’s where everything really changed. Before that, I think I took her to the doctor once because she had to have shoulder surgery. Other than that, she had ear surgery many years ago. Other than that, I didn’t even know where her doctors were or any of that. Never had to help her with paying bills or anything. So it was a shock, but it was a one-and-done. One day she was fine, and the very next day, we became caregivers.
Antonia: How did you find yourself balancing work, school, and your caregiving responsibilities for your mom, especially during COVID or right after that challenging time?
Stacey: Yeah, so it all happened right at the beginning of COVID, really in July of 2020. So it’s kind of a blessing in a way because we were working from home. My sister and my niece and I take care of my mom, and my sister’s a beautician, so she wasn’t working at all, and my niece was finishing her senior year at Michigan State, so she was doing online classes. And then I was working from home. So when my mom got COVID in 2020, in July, my niece and my sister got COVID too. So they all had it. I didn’t. My mom was in the hospital for about a month, and then we brought her home. The doctors thought she was an old lady with dementia who happened to get COVID, but she really wasn’t. COVID really caused the acceleration of dementia. So since August, when we brought her home, we’ve been caregiving. Luckily, because we were working from home, it was easy at first. We split up the days and evenings, and we were here with her around the clock. I’m at her house now, actually, because it’s one of my days. I was just working from home. Everybody was going through so much at the time at work that everybody was doing different things. We had people with kids. Some people moved down to Florida so they didn’t have to be in the cold weather when the fall came. So we made it work because we could. Since then, it’s gone very smoothly for us, but we are 100% the caregivers for my mom.
Kristie: Stacey, can you elaborate a little bit more about those family dynamics and the change that took place? Because in our conversations, and you even said it just a moment ago, it was one day we were okay, and then the next day, we were caregivers. Talk about those family dynamics and the change that took place. One thing I thought was really amazing that we often don’t talk about is how COVID affects so many families in different ways. This was the impact that it had on your family.
Stacey: Yeah, so my sister and I, it’s just the two of us. We’re 13 months apart, so we grew up really close. But as adults, we’re in our late fifties now, we didn’t hang out much. We’re like night and day, have totally different friends, and we really just got together for holidays, a lot of texting and stuff like that. But just spending every minute talking and worrying about one person, which was my mom, we had never done that before. I was shocked that we had one argument in the first week, and that’s it. All this time, we haven’t had any arguments. I do bite my tongue a lot, so that’s part of it, but we don’t have any arguments. It was almost like we just fell into it. We have seven days a week. We kind of broke the days up into two shifts, so we got 14 shifts and there’s three of us. Who can work, who can be here when, and that’s how we did it. It has really worked out. We haven’t had to have a sit-down talk about someone not doing their fair share. Because I’m in finance and I’m the oldest, even by just a year, I do all the bill paying and make most of the doctor’s appointments, take care of the pills, and do all her medication. It was really easy for us to figure out how to do it. Especially because during COVID, my niece, we didn’t let her work. She graduated in December of 2020, and we were like, well, you don’t need to work. So we pay her for her shifts. It’s just worked out. We haven’t had any outside caregivers. The other thing is we didn’t really have a choice because during COVID, if we had put her in a facility, we wouldn’t have been able to see her. We would’ve been talking to her outside of a window. We just couldn’t imagine doing that. She’s been in the hospital a couple of times since the lockdown, but we were able to spend those days with her. We haven’t really left her alone much. I leave her alone to go see Kristie at the gym, but a couple of hours here and there, that’s it. But we have made it work. I’m really proud of how we’ve been doing this, actually.
Antonia: Yeah, it sounds like you all have come together. It sounds like a great story, honestly. But Stacey, can I ask you, how has COVID-19 specifically impacted your mother’s dementia and overall health? You’ve talked about it a little bit, but can you share a little bit more?
Stacey: Yeah, so dementia, like most people, is considered mostly a respiratory illness, and that’s what we heard a lot about—people on ventilators and needing oxygen. But a lot of people had neurological symptoms too. That’s all my mom had. She wasn’t on oxygen. I think maybe one day in the hospital, no ventilator or any of that. It was all neurological. Her neurologist said there’s a lot of people, and you don’t hear a lot about it, but younger people in their forties and fifties, that had the neurological side of it. For my mom, it sort of escalated what was probably coming all along. After we got her home and started talking to some of her friends, my sister and I started reflecting on a few things. She probably was starting to have signs of dementia that we just didn’t pick up on, but COVID itself escalated all of that. The recovery for her is not going to happen. Younger people can kind of come back. She’s not. She is an 89-year-old now with dementia. We didn’t really see it coming. But I think it was really kind of a blessing that it all just happened because otherwise, something bad could have happened. She could have left the stove on or gotten lost for hours or something. This way, it was just like when we got her out of the hospital, she needed full-time care, and so we just had to step in.
Kristie: How did you guys adjust emotionally? You’re used to a mom that was, you described your mom as this active PhD. She was doing all the things. So emotionally, being able to think differently around that, how did that impact you all?
Stacey: I think we kind of talk about it like dementia does not care how smart you were or how active you were. My mom did a lot of the right things. She stayed active, she stayed intellectually engaged, doing the New York Times crossword puzzle, walking all the time, and helping my niece in college. She did everything right. That was the shock. I remember talking about it with my sister, like, well, it doesn’t really care how smart you were. You get dementia, you just have it. We got her in the hospital when it happened, she just was not herself. So we just had to come to terms with it. It’s kind of like, this is what you got. She’s not going to go back to being who she was. And so the most important thing we wanted to do was make her comfortable. She didn’t seem to have much fear. When she was in the hospital, there were a couple of weeks where I couldn’t see her at all, but my niece and my sister did see her because they all had it. I talked to her on the phone, and she was trying to check herself out of the hospital, trying to get someone to come and pick her up. So when I finally got to see her, she was like, oh, okay. I’m with my family, I’m okay. But at first, it was really hard. She didn’t recognize us. It was really scary. It’s kind of like if we’re all in this together, we’ve got to make it work. We talked about it with our friends and some other caregivers, and we had some support. We’re lucky. I can’t say enough how lucky we are that we didn’t have any friction between us. My niece was young enough, she was able to be really resilient, and it’s all worked out for us. It’s not perfect, but it’s worked out.
Antonia: What specific challenges have you faced, and how have you overcome them as a family?
Stacey: The specific challenge for me was getting used to how my mom changed. Sometimes we laugh about things that she says, and we probably shouldn’t. The other thing is the financial piece of it. She lives in a house that my sister and I own together, and when we were bringing her home, we had to get the whole house redone. It’s a ranch, but there’s a couple of steps to get into the house, so we had to put ramps in, and then she had to have a walker and now she has a wheelchair. She couldn’t get into the bathtub, so we had to redo the bathtub to make it a walk-in shower. There’s been a lot of financial things that had to take place right away. We just did it. We had to figure it out and do it. I used to go out all the time to different events and things. I don’t do any of that anymore. The only thing I do is go to the gym and go to work. So it’s been an emotional and physical adjustment. But when you know you’ve got to do it, you’ve just got to step up and do it. There’s really no way around it. I’m lucky enough to have friends like Kristie and some others who can talk about things and keep me encouraged. It’s just been helpful.
Antonia: It sounds like you guys have been resilient and have adapted well. But what advice would you offer to other caregivers who might be navigating similar challenges?
Stacey: I think the best advice is to talk to other caregivers and to be honest with your family. When my mom first came home, she was really unhappy. I think she was mad at us, but there’s really nothing she could have done. But I would say to try to stay in touch with your friends and people who are close to you. We’ve got some friends who help. My mom has some friends who come over, and they call and talk to her. It helps her, too, because she can talk to people. We do take her out, but that’s really hard to do. Just be honest with yourself and your family, and don’t try to take on too much yourself. If you need help, get help. If you can afford it, hire people to come in and help. And just know that it’s okay to take a break. I take breaks sometimes. I go to Kristie’s gym and work out. I try to do things for myself so I can be the best caregiver I can be.
Antonia: That’s great advice, Stacey. Thank you for sharing your journey and insights with us today. We appreciate your openness and the valuable lessons you’ve shared.
Stacey: Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.
Kristie: Thank you, Stacey. And thank you to our listeners for joining us on Caregiver Conversations. Remember, you’re not alone in your caregiving journey. There are resources and support available to help you navigate the challenges and find joy in the moments that matter. Until next time, take care.