If you’ve been a caregiver for a long time, you know just how hard it can be. Perhaps, at first, you were more than willing to take on the job because you knew what it meant to your loved one. Maybe you managed the first few weeks or months or even years with ease, running from work to errands to your loved ones – and back again. You played phone tag with doctors, scheduled treatments, and even played chauffeur. The lack of free time you had to yourself maybe didn’t seem like such a big deal in comparison to the good you were doing. But over time, the pressures of caregiving can weigh anyone down.This book is not a self-help book. It's a let-others-help-you book, in which caregivers share their distressing, sometimes overwhelming feelings - and their hard-won self-care skills and wisdom. It's a support group between covers, designed to help readers with the hardest part of the process: dealing with their own emotions.Each chapter takes up one of the emotions that hits a caregiver as the reality of their partner's condition sinks in anger, fear, sorrow, acceptance, renewal, joy.
