How it Began...

Hi there,

Welcome to Caregiver Salad. I'm so glad you're here.

Let's dig right in.

What is Caregiver Salad, you say?

It's the term I use for a whole lot of caregiving for a whole lot of people.

I work in an assisted living community in the dementia unit. When a resident can't get their words out or things come out in a garbled mixed up mess, we call that word salad.

In my world we have a whole lotta caring going on that sometimes can become a jumbled mixed up mess.

So I'm here to sort it out.

First off, a little about me. I am a mother of 5.

I became a mom at 17 years old.

Because I was only 17 and had no insurance, my cares were provided by a non profit organization, therefore some of the things that are standard procedure now, weren't provided to me then; such as ultrasounds.

I never had even one throughout my entire pregnancy.

About 7or 8 months along my baby quit kicking like he had. I only felt really light kicks down by my pubic bone. In months prior, he would kick a plate right off my belly.

Ya, I said he. Even without the test I knew he was a boy and his name was gonna' be Aaron.

Well, at first he was gonna' be a Cody, but we agreed on Aaron at about month 4 when we went to a parenting class and the first baby we met was Cody Michael.

I just knew he was gonna' be a boy.

Anyway, I begged and begged for an ultrasound after he stopped kicking but I was told since they could find his heartbeat they wouldn't do one; those were only for emergencies.

Aaron was due on Feb. 10th, 1991. On January 24th I went into the hospital with what I thought were labor pains. After having five babies I realize now that I most definitely was not in active labor but when they checked to see if I was dilating my boy was so far down in the birth canal they could feel his toes. Yep, breach and stuck!

I knew I only felt those really low kicks. I knew he had been that way for at least 8 weeks.

Just the day before I had been in for a regular appointment and told he was head down and ready to go when I mentioned this to the hospital staff they told me he must have just flipped overnight.

Mmmmm, ok. I'm thinking I may have noticed that.

Because of his position it was decided I would be having an emergency c-section, right now today.

Everybody got busy prepping me for an emergency C.

Although I was a teenage mom I was one of the lucky ones who still had the dad in the picture. So here I was at the hospital with my mother and we couldn't get ahold of dad.

You gotta' remember this was a time before cell phones.

We called his home, his work, his mom's and nothing.

Finally with just a few minutes to spare he came running through the door and off we went to surgery.

That C-section was so painful I will never forget it.

You won't feel any pain, just a little pressure they said. B.S.!

With my mom on one shoulder and my son's dad on the other I felt like I was being torn apart; oh wait, I was.

Then he was here. A little redheaded screaming bundle of joy. I was so excited to be a mom but who did they hand him to first; my mother not me or his dad but my mother.

Welcome to the joys of being a 17 year old unwed mother.

Not only was the surgery extremely painful the recovery was the most God awful experience of my life to date.

Let me rephrase - the most God awful physical pain I have experienced to date.

The things we would encounter with my son moving forward by far outweigh the pain of that 6 weeks.

We didn't know it that day, or really for a few years after our beautiful baby was born but something just wasn't right.

Aaron has been through more struggles in his 33 years then we could ever have imagined. That day was just our beginning.

That day was day one of my entrance into the world of Caregiving.

Thank you for joining me on my journey back through my history; how it all started, all the bumps and all the glory. I hope to take you into my world with Aaron, his brothers and sisters, my grand babies and my inlaws along with how I came to be at a job I love like no other.

Caring for others can be an extremely difficult job but it can also be the most rewarding thing you will do in your lifetime.