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Caregiver burnout and my Dad who I have been caring for 24/7 fired me
Caregivers | Last Active: Oct 27, 2025 | Replies (27)Comment receiving replies
@jojok My father is also Vietnam vet with Parkinson’s from agent orange. I also navigated the VA for 2 years and he was award 100% disability. It was a hard road to navigate but it was worth it. I don’t know how we would manage without those benifits. His medical is covered and prescriptions. He also gets a nice allotment that we use toward help caregiver. My mom has been on hospice and she needs 24 hour care. The last two weeks she can’t stand or walk. Dad has Parkinson’s Lewie body which has a lot of the mental challenges like hallucinations and delusions. He still has no balance, freezing legs and tremors of Parkinson. His speech is very slurred and quiet. He has diabetes and CHF as well. I am the main caregiver. We pay our hired caregiver for 35 hours a week. At $700 a week. That’s why the VA PACT money is appreciated so much. My father gets in his military moods a lot. He was a captain and was used to giving orders. He has night mares still every night. Now with the hallucinations and delusions you can imagine they are always about people in the days of Vietnam. The ones he lost or his superiors. One time in the middle of the night he was upset because the Germans were not negotiating like they said they would. He took me to a spot in the room & said here he is. You tell to negotiate like he is supposed to. I told dad I can’t make him negotiate it I can tell him to leave and not come back until he is ready. So I asked the imagined German to leave our house. Dads said thank you. He back to bed. He also is very paranoid about people taking his stufff, his money etc…even me sometimes.
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@pebbles2661 You have your hands full! I'm so grateful for the care my husband and I receive from the VA for his Agent Orange/Parkinson's diagnosis. You may be eligible for more benefits from the VA. My husband and I are given fifteen hours a week of home health aide care, five hours three days a week, and my husband is also eligible for respite care in a VA approved unit which gives me a break occasionally.
I agree that the best way to handle the nightmare delusions is to go along with them and soothe the person by taking care of the problem. Good for you for getting rid of the enemy! We've had quite a few scenarios where I've needed to talk my husband down by taking care of the situation as if it were real. I've steered a boat away from the rocks, I've helped when there were dead bodies everywhere and cared for my husband when he's broken into loud sobs in the middle of the night. Some nights, with the bathroom visits and the nightmares, we have very little sleep. But Parkinson's makes the person awake at night and asleep during the day so if you hope to ever get any sleep at night then that cycle needs to be broken if possible.
My husband also is paranoid but not all the time fortunately. He told me this morning as I was dressing him in clean clothing after a common bathroom 'accident' that he wanted to get out of my clutches. I began to explain to him that the alternative was going to be long term care but I need to keep reminding myself that being rational doesn't work.
It sounds like your mother may need hospice. I wish you strength, courage and faith to keep going with everything you are doing. Your parents are so blessed to have you!
The VA also has caregiver support. I hope you have a moment to call them for help. I was so busy and exhausted taking care of my husband that I didn't have time to call. My son stepped up and worked with the VA to get me the support I needed. He was polite and persistent, always calling them back to ask if there was progress. He had the energy that I didn't have. You might benefit from an advocate too. Eventually I also began to get a caregiver's stipend too. You may be eligible for that as well. As long as the caregivers can take care of their loved ones, the government is relieved of the cost of paying for long term care which is very expensive. I wish you the very best of luck. We are certainly taking an intense course in learning to be patient!