Long distance caregiving, the struggles, worries and concerns for your elderly loved one

Any caregiver that is more than an hour from their elderly loved one could be considered a long distance caregiver.
The term long distance was applied many years ago to our phone system and was used for calls that were considered out of the area. It also implied that if you were making a long distance call, you could not quickly get to the person you were calling. Nowadays, a long distance caregiver is in the same situation, the caregiver cannot quickly get to the elderly person they are helping.
This makes for much stress and often worry in regards to the health and safety of the elderly loved one. Not being able to jump in the car to go and check on mom or being able to swing by on a regular basis can result in increase worry over eating habits, sleeping increase or decrease, memory impairment progression and other physical illnesses such as diabetes, high blood pressure or heart problems.
Long distance caregivers need to find someone close to the person such as family member, neighbor or even paid caregiver to go in and visit with the elderly loved one. During this visit, the person should take note of whether the person is eating, by looking casually around the kitchen, clues such as food decreasing in the refrig and cabinets probably means they are cooking it, containers in the trash show they ate something, the dirty dishes in sink may also clue you in if there is movement in the kitchen.
Keeping on an eye on such things as body odor, house odor - is there a smell of urine?, changing clothes, is laundry filling up? and other clues will help to know if the person is bathing or not. The visitor can be very casual when looking around taking notes in his or head about what they see and then reporting it back to you.
If your loved one has pills in bottle, the pills should be decreasing. One time I went to see a client who lived alone and said she was taking her pills as prescribed. I asked if I could see the name of the medication, she said sure. When I picked up the full bottle it was dated a month ago and the pills were to be taken 3 times a day. Clearly she had not taken any of them or was taking sporadically. Pill boxes can cause problems too as people with memory impairment can take the wrong days of the week, forget to take pills or mix things together.
If you have a person who is willing to check in on your loved one, ask him or her to look for signs for eating, sleeping, changing clothes, medications and even driving issues. Ask them to call you with concerns so that you can be aware of changes that are taking place. This will enable you to know that you need to pay a visit sooner than you thought or more frequently. To read more articles like this, Comfort Keepers provides various resources for caregivers.