As one of six daughters, Leonor Garrison shares caregiving duties for her mother, Maria Rosario Nieblas, who has high blood pressure and early symptoms of memory loss or dementia.
Garrison first connected with the Southern Caregiver Resource Center at a health fair about three years ago, and soon after began taking workshops and classes to improve the care she provides.
In addition to her role as a caregiver, Garrison is a mom of four and grandmother of two. While caring for her husband when he was sick, she started to feel overwhelmed, so the most important lesson she has learned from the SCRC classes is the importance of caring for herself.
“I was in a situation where I was getting sick constantly, but it was because I had a lot of pressure on me,” Garrison said. “SCRC helped me to monitor those times when my stress was high, so they taught me how to calm myself down, how to take time for myself, and to help myself first before I help others.”
Southern Caregivers Resource Center is a nonprofit based in Kearny Mesa that supports family members caring for adults with chronic and disabling conditions throughout San Diego and Imperial counties.
Caregivers are eligible to sign up with SCRC if their loved one is an adult with a cognitive impairment that developed after the age of 18 — such as dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, traumatic brain injury or Parkinson’s disease — or if the care recipient is 60 or older and in need of assistance with daily living activities.
Although many of their in-person services have been on hold throughout the course of the pandemic, the organization continues to serve the community through its online offerings, like the REACH2Caregivers program.
SCRC worked with researchers from Stanford University, UC San Diego and San Diego State University to adapt a clinical study called REACH — short for Resources for Enhancing Alzheimer’s Caregiver Health — into a program that can be used in a real life setting, known as REACH2Caregivers. After initially being launched in South Bay San Diego’s Spanish-speaking community, the program now aims to reach caregivers in all underserved areas of the region, said Martha Rañón, SCRC executive vice president.
More than 2,600 family caregivers have received support through the REACH2Caregivers program since it launched in 2009, and it’s now offered in both Spanish and English.
Often when clients first start taking classes at SCRC, there is a lack of understanding of how their loved ones are impacted by dementia, Rañón said. This can add extra stress to an already busy caregiver’s plate.
“I was getting sick constantly, but it was because I had a lot of pressure on me. SCRC helped me to monitor those times when my stress was high, so they taught me how to calm myself down, how to take time for myself, and to help myself first before I help others.”
Leonor Garrison, caregiver for her mother
Leonor Garrison is one of six daughters who shares caregiving duties for her 79-year-old mother, who has some early symptoms of dementia.
(Nancee E. Lewis / For The San Diego Union-Tribune)
“Sometimes a caregiver comes to us just frustrated, saying, ‘My husband keeps repeating the same thing over and over, it’s driving me crazy,’ ” Rañón said.
Educating the caregivers about the ins and outs of dementia helps to improve health conditions for family caregivers so they in turn can provide better care for their loved ones. The program has also been shown to reduce depression and decrease feelings of being overburdened, and family caregivers tend to be less troubled by their care recipient’s memory lapses and behavioral issues.
“Once they have an understanding of the disease and how it’s not the person but the disease that is causing that person to repeat themselves, then they know it’s not him, they’re not doing it on purpose, and now they can do something, so there’s that empowerment piece,” Rañón said.
Through the SCRC classes, Garrison said she was able to learn how to help her mother create her own advanced health directive and will, which reduced more of her stress.
“Sometimes, it’s education that we need to know what kind of resources that are there in the community,” she said. “I also learned to delegate — if we don’t do the stuff on our own, it might not be done the way that we like it, but we need to lose the controlling issues we have and let other people help us to do it.”
For more information about the Southern Caregivers Resource Center and its support programs, visit caregivercenter.org or call (858) 268-4432.
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January 19, 2021 at 08:30PM
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