Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: All right. And we're live here at episode six of Care Tech and Tips with your hosts Barry Johnson and Bobby Clark. Good to see everybody today.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: Hello everybody. Happy Veterans Week. Happy Veterans Day. Depending on when you're listening to this. And thanks to all those who served in our armed forces. And we really thank you for your service.
[00:00:20] Speaker A: Thank you for your service for sure.
All right. Well, how's your week going, Mr. Clark?
[00:00:38] Speaker B: As always, busy. You know, it's November already and I'm beginning to wonder where the year went. Before you know it, 2025 will be the thing you write on your checks. For you young people, checks are pieces of paper that you actually, you know, paid things for. It's not always cash app or something else on the world. But yeah, it's just one of those busy things and you know, at the university is kind of busy this time of year as they close out the fall semester.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: So good to be always something going on. Always something going on. But it won't be too long before we start looking to looking into holiday parties and gatherings and get togethers and all that kind of stuff. And I hear you, you kind of had a virtual get together here recently. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
[00:01:21] Speaker B: So shout out to my an unknown but known father in law and his birthday, it was last week and so he is in assisted living at the moment. And so we had to be a little non traditional about how we have his event. And turns out there's lots of tech out there that you can use to do that. We use FaceTime, but there are other ways to do that. Of course you could do a zoom or something like that and it turned out really well.
[00:01:48] Speaker A: Cool. Cool.
[00:01:50] Speaker B: He doesn't have a phone at the moment so we basically brought in an iPad and called up some people and had a party.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: Oh, that's awesome. So you had different people in different places besides just from.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: Yeah, we had people in D.C. i was in up here in the upstate of South Carolina and there were people in Columbia and people in Orangeburg. And so it was. We had five or six people at one time and then I think my wife also. So we had a section of immediate family and then they went and he called people he knew. So probably in the Columbia area. So that was a nice thing to do and it worked surprisingly well.
[00:02:27] Speaker A: Oh, that's super cool. I'm glad. Hope you enjoyed it.
[00:02:31] Speaker B: That really can help you if you've never used, if you haven't used it in a while and lots of people use it all the time. But if you haven't used it, if you're a zoom user like I am, there are some nice things about it, like adding and removing people you can switch back and forth. It kind of gives you an indication of who's talking, how it positions the windows. That helped my father who was looking at things, wondering who said what.
[00:02:56] Speaker A: Oh, good point. I haven't even thought about that. So it kind of gives you an indicator about who's talking, whether or not you're really watching their lips or not.
[00:03:03] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:03:04] Speaker A: Oh, cool. Cool.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: Yeah. So we work really well.
[00:03:08] Speaker A: Well, that's fantastic. I know. I've only used it for one on one stuff. I don't think I've ever used a FaceTime for a whole bunch of people at one time. So I'm glad that that works as easy as it seems like it should.
[00:03:18] Speaker B: 16.
[00:03:19] Speaker A: So obviously I'd be kind of tight on a phone, but you know, if you had a bigger screen like an iPad, I could see that iPad.
[00:03:26] Speaker B: It works a lot better. But yeah, and all you really need is an Internet connection. So you don't even need a phone line.
[00:03:32] Speaker A: Oh, that's nice. That's nice. It makes me think sometimes I wish Apple would have a model of the iPad that's just a super huge screen with a fairly simple interface. Like we don't. It didn't need to be a pro, need to have a lot of horsepower. It just needs to be able to FaceTime really, really well. I think that would be awesome for a lot of folks, especially older folks for sure. So you said he's using assisted living now. How did, how did, how did that go, how did that transition go getting him into assisted living?
[00:03:59] Speaker B: So again, I'm not one minute to minute on it, but what I saw from a, from adjacent to it was so my father in law had a, had a stroke event and so we had to get him into hospitals and rehab and then assisted living. So moving to three different places was a little chaotic and it can be stressful. So you have to prepare yourself for that.
And he was also a VA recipient, he's a veteran and so that was complicated. So navigating those kinds of systems is always difficult. I'm saying that to affirm whoever's going through this now and listening now, if you say, yeah, this is hard, yeah, it is hard. And so you should really get help to do that. And there are lots of places where you can go. The VA is not just one of those places. There are other places you can go where people can help you with that. And I would suggest to you that you seek that out.
This is not the thing for a first time person to get through and expect a good result. You need some assistance.
[00:05:02] Speaker A: So you kind of need a Sherpa to go through all the stuff. Yeah.
[00:05:08] Speaker B: And if you're, you're old hat to the VA benefits, then you realize you have to have forms and forms have to have timelines and they have to go to the right places.
[00:05:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:16] Speaker B: So you ask the right questions about those kinds of things because they're not always given to you up front.
[00:05:21] Speaker A: I see. Well, I tell you, I've kind of experienced some of that myself in the last week or so.
Not to the extent of it being dealing with the va, but my, my aunt has moved into assisted living in the last week or so and I' kind of helped her navigate that. And I know exactly what you're talking about, about forms and timelines and lots of things around that. There's parts of detail, Lots of detail, lots of detail. So just for the listeners, there's a lot of things that you got to do first. You got to, you know, you got, you got to get on. A lot of times you have to get on a waiting list to find a. If you, there's a particular assisted living that you want, you have to get on the waiting list ahead of time and often it requires a deposit just to be able to get on the waiting. Honest, we, we kind of lucked up in her case in that she had been looking at doing this. She's. This is not a, it's not an involuntary thing. She actually wanted to do this. And so she's been kind of, you know, talking with me about it and I've been on the lookout for her. And we found a place that she liked and she expressed some interest in getting into it. And we got really super lucky that we didn't have to get on a waiting list that the time. At the time we asked about that one, there was an opening and it was the kind of apartment that she liked. And it turned out that that was a good thing. What it took really though, was it took a check to hold it. And the, I think the tough thing about that, especially in her mind, was to get right, was that, you know, just because you, you've put money on this thing doesn't mean you have to move in right that minute. You know, there was a lot of stress around. Well, I'm not ready to move in yet. I said, yeah, but you know what? We still need to do this, go ahead and get some money down on it because it might not be there when you are ready. So. And it was, it was good in a couple of, couple of ways. It was a, there was a motivating aspect there of oh, I've already paid for this, I better use this thing. So that was, that was kind of a motivating aspect to get ready. And you know, but it was, I think, I think it was a good thing for her psyche to say, oh, okay, this is great, I have a place ready. But you know, given that, you know, once you've done the paper, once you've done the deposit, there's still a lot of paperwork. There's a lot of medical history stuff that you have to get some of it that the person's primary doctor has to fill out for you and do signing. There are some medical tests that have to happen. I think most all places like that require a tuberculosis test and that involves doing a little scrape on an arm and then coming back three days later and looking at that scrape and determining whether or not tuberculosis is in a person's system. And of course I don't know a lot about that, but I think it's probably highly, highly contagious. So they're really, really super careful about that.
But you know, overall there's some things about the process that seem very, very sticklery. There's a lot of paperwork that you got to do and that kind of thing. And then on some aspects of it seem kind of, kind of casual and relaxed. It's really odd, you know, coming from a university environment. Bobby and I are, are both workers. That's the word. That's the word. That's right. We're experienced workers in bureaucracy working for a state, state sponsored university for years. And you know, there's, there's certain levels of it that seems like, okay, that was all there was to it. You just had to fill out this form and sign it. It seems like there had to be a lot more verification involved in certain aspects and it really wasn't. So that, that's kind of bizarre, but gosh. But the actual movement experience was awesome. On the day that we, we got her moved in, we, we gave him a call, let them know we were coming. We got there and greeted at the door by, by the head of the facility.
She took my aunt to go have lunch and to go meet some people. I helped get, get some things unpacked while that was happening and get some things arranged. She had some furniture delivered. All that was just super straightforward. And easy. But overall the whole thing has been a good thing for my aunt so far. You know, there's, there's a little bit of, I don't know, moving in kind of things to get used to. You know, we, we experienced that back in the day when we'd move into apartments and things. It's like, okay, where's the in in this case? You know, how does laundry work here? What about trash? Trash pickup?
How do you get onto WI Fi? How, you know, what's the, what's the. In her case? What's the schedule for meals, bathing and laundry getting done and house cleaning and all those kinds of things are all dietary.
[00:10:12] Speaker B: Dietary preferences.
They were asking my father in law, what, how does he like his laundry done? You know, is it, you know, with a particular kind of thing? So very good at that kind of thing. I'll tell you the thing that I, that I agree upon, which is we mentioned tuberculosis. And you know, obviously they're going to do some covet tests because that was obviously an issue.
Making sure that your vaccines are in line is a good thing to uncomplicate in some way when your loved one has had their vaccinations and what you need to get because remember, some of those things take a while to kick in. So you have to think about that a little bit.
The other thing that I think really caught me off guard that we did solve, not necessarily a tech thing, but you may use tech to solve it, is they do a very good job of internally onboarding your loved one to what you're in. You have to make sure that your loved one's friends and neighbors and people who want to visit them know the protocol for what they need to do to visit them.
[00:11:17] Speaker A: Right?
[00:11:17] Speaker B: And so my father in law is very active in his church. They wanted to come see him. We had to make sure they knew. Okay, visiting our ends here, this is how you get in. You have to either you have to be on a list or maybe you don't have to be on a list. You know, when can you see him? Do he, does he want visitors?
Those kinds of things, conversations. So make sure you, you pay a little attention to that because you don't want to just simply cut off that person from the, from the world they had before they walked in. You want to make sure that they know, okay, here are the rules.
It was, you know, making sure the church knew what to do. And so you have to watch that because you want them to remain engaged and you don't want them sit back going, nobody's visiting me. Well, that's because nobody knew to visit you or knew how to visit you.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: Or do they could for that matter. Yeah, yeah. So that makes me wonder about like. So in your case, I think your, your father in law's case, it is his like assisted living or is it rehab or is it.
[00:12:17] Speaker B: Well, he went to, he went to the kind of both of them. So.
[00:12:20] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:12:21] Speaker B: Not to put his business out on the world enough Internet, but you know, he, when you have an event like that, rehab is important and then you have to continue rehab in an assisted living because he maybe can't stay by himself for a while.
[00:12:33] Speaker A: Right. So there's more of a medical focus there.
Yeah, that's great. And this is a good thing, I think to highlight is there's different levels of assisted living and care. And in the case with my aunt, you know, she's medically, she's in pretty good shape.
You know, she's got a few small things, but for the most part it was just really the, the stress and the, all the things that are necessary to keep up a home by yourself if you're, if you're not used to it. And at a certain age that becomes daunting. And there's so much to think about that I think she just finally said, you know, I really don't want to think about all that. I've gone through enough in the last year or so and I want somebody else to take care of that kind of thing for me. And in her case, the place is referred to as senior living. So it's not quite as medically intensive. It's. In her case there's an apartment, she can come and go as she likes, she can have visitors as she likes. You know, those kinds of things. So, you know, know that when you're looking for a place, think about the level of care that your, your person needs. And there are options out there and they come with, you know, all kinds of different names and options and varieties and costs for that matter, based on the level of care for the person. So there's a lot of that. Did we miss anything in there?
[00:13:52] Speaker B: No, I think this. It's just that you have to realize what is your loved one need. So for your particular one, senior living felt like the right place for her.
For my loved one, assisted living was really where he needed to be. And there's other kinds of versions of that too. There's memory care, there's care for particular ailments that you can get. You can certainly involve medical in any of those things, so that's one of the items. And you really have to have a conversation with your loved one about what they want to, what they, what they think they need and then maybe balance that with what they can afford so that you can get the right place. So it's as complicated as moving into a new house.
[00:14:34] Speaker A: It really is.
[00:14:36] Speaker B: So watch out for that. And you know, those conversations can get laborious. And you told me about a really cool tech tip that you've used to capture detail and I really think you should share with everybody. It's really cool.
[00:14:51] Speaker A: Well, absolutely. And as you know, as people, our listeners know, we like to talk about the care aspects, but we also like to talk about the technology aspects. And we're Apple folks so we use a lot of Apple tools and in this case I'm going to highlight one of them. I'm sure there are probably similar things on the other platforms, but this one was the, my iPhone. I just recently upgraded it to iOS 18.1 and with that comes some more Apple intelligence features. And the one that I used the other day was we were, we were getting my aunt moved in and we're kind of having a conversation with the resident director and it was, it was a kind of a full speed download of all the things that you need to know to live in this place and all the varieties of options. And you know, my aunt was asking a lot of questions and this, this person was, was given a lot of answers. And I'm sitting here kind of thinking about how am I going to capture all this. So what I did was I cranked up my Apple notes and opened a new note. And these days you can do add an attachment and one of the attachments options is a voice memo now and when you do that it pops up a little interface where you can just start recording and that's great, you know, it's nice to be able to have a recording that goes along with whatever you're trying to keep notes on. Right. So we talked for quite a while. This thing's recording for quite a while. But you know, the recording part is not the, not, not the actual cool part. When we were done, I was able to stop the recording and hit a little button on the side and said transcribe this for me. And it went off and took a few minutes to do it, but it came back and it had transcribed the entire conversation between three people. And it was really, really accurate. I couldn't find, honestly, I don't think there was more than one or two little mistakes. Maybe where Someone said a person's name and it wasn't quite sure and it, you know, it misspelled the name of the person. So, you know, it did a great job of that. But once you see the transcript, then you can cut and paste and you can drop it into a note so you can go back and review the whole thing. And I hear that there is another feature that I actually haven't used. It may be that my phone's not capable of it quite yet because I have an older phone. But tell me about the summarize feature.
[00:17:09] Speaker B: So you can, you can select a piece of text with this new 18:1 and there are options to summarize it. So if you have a long transcription and you want to summarize it, say in a few words, you can actually collect that. Hit summarize on the buttons. And I think it's available in Nozer. I know it's available in some of the other apps like Mail and a few other places. It will summarize what you've highlighted and it does a really good job with that summary. One of the things that generative AI does really well is summarize data points.
This can be the thing that if you're okay, you want to. You want to get the gist of what's going on, or you want to give your loved one maybe a small snippet of what happened, you can do a summarize like that and it will lead towards you. Now, I'll give my AI warning, but I always do never trust AI by itself to do everything right. It's always going to make some mistake, just like a human. And so you need to be engaged and check things and double and make things okay. But it can save you time because trust with verify. Trust with verify.
So you can do that kind of thing. And then it's amazing what the new tools can do with AI to save you time and effort.
[00:18:22] Speaker A: So that's awesome. I've got it. Actually, I'm going to go back and do that with that conversation. I've gone through it and picked out the things myself and I want to go back and see how accurate it is. And I'm guessing that it's probably like most AI things, the more you use it, the more you do it, the more accurate it becomes because you can give it feedback about whether it was good or not.
That's very cool.
[00:18:43] Speaker B: Normally the way to find something like that I just did a select is you go to the writing tools and if you go to the carrot associated, it'll show you proofread and rewrite a part of the items, but summarizes in the bottom of it and it just awesome right up.
[00:18:58] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm going there. Just as soon as we get done with recording, I'm going to have to do that for sure. So.
So, you know, that. That brought up another thing. The. I know a lot of the assisted living facilities are definitely rehab or facilities that are more medically focused.
Usually have generator systems and uninterruptible power supplies for the facility. But, you know, I think we talked about this a couple episodes back when, during the hurricane episode, that a lot of these places have certain outlets, power outlets in a room that are hooked to the generator, but there's others that aren't. Well, in my aunt's case, I don't think that her apartment is set up that way. I don't think that all the, all the, all the socket. I don't think there's any outlets in there that are. That go directly to the generator. I think theirs are more focused on making sure that heating and lighting and air conditioning and all that kind of stuff is happening throughout the facility where they can cook dinner and they can, you know, keep everybody cool. But it did make me think one of the she. One of the things that she bought for a place was a new couch that has nice recliners on the side that are. That have the buttons where you can kind of let them up and down electronically and has phone chargers on the side. It's just very cool. But one thing that was a little concerning is that what if you're in that thing reclined and the power goes off, you got to kind of roll out of that sucker because it doesn't have a battery backup. And it made me think that it would might be a bad idea to pick up something like a, I don't know, an ecoflow or a Jackery power station, one of these small power stations that will give you some AC outlets so that you can do low power things if you need them. In the case that you're. You're in a situation where you lose power and it may be out for a few hours. And I'm thinking about adding that to the list of things to think about for when you go to. A person goes to assisted living. They're, you know, they're not, they're not exactly cheap. They're not all that expensive too. So they're in the middle. And you can probably find, you know, whatever option that you need for how much power you need. But if you want to think about doing something like that. One of the things you have to do is look at the power usage of the things that you want to plug into it and add all that up and then buy a battery system that would be appropriate for that kind of a power output. So I know you were thinking about doing something like that too for there's.
[00:21:27] Speaker B: A low end version of that. So a while back I thought about coming up with an idea to give my parents something so they were getting off their phone lines and go to ATT phone line which would always work when the power was out. That was not true anymore because they were doing their cable company. And so I wanted to make sure they had an ability to have something that would be charged, ready to go if some storm hit, knocked the power out. And maybe similar in a learning facility to an assistant living facility. So there are power outlets you can buy that have built in power chargers into them.
[00:22:05] Speaker A: Oh really?
[00:22:06] Speaker B: Well, there are lots of different ones out there. I'm not going to name anyone particular, but when. So they're, they're in the power supply, you plug it into the wall and if the power goes out you can push out basically what looks like a little power strip or a battery and plug your phone into it and it will keep a charge, allow you to make some calls and things like that. That might be a cool idea. And they're very inexpensive. Actually I've seen them in the twenty to thirty to forty dollar range, depending on what you have. So you know, so now you have a power strip that you can put things in and if something wear out, you can move, you can move a battery out and use it to charge your phone or to run your laptop for a little bit. It wouldn't be a lot of power, but it might get you by for the next, for an hour or two to get you.
[00:22:50] Speaker A: That's great.
That's great. That's great. That's a great, great recommendation too because you may not need something with a big electric motor. You may just need to charge the phone, run a lamp with an LED light bulb in it. Just a few small things like that for, you know, no longer that it may or may not be out. You know, if you're in a case where you got a hurricane, which is pretty rare event, especially where we live, you know, you may need something a little bit more, but it's hard to know what level you need. But you know, start small. I think that's a real, real good point.
[00:23:21] Speaker B: And Barry, I also talked about maybe rechargeable Batteries being in that too, because, you know, you can put them in and have them ready to go. So not for power outages per se, but when that battery and that remote goes out and now you need to figure out what to do.
[00:23:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:36] Speaker B: So having a couple of double A's or AAA's in a battery pack like that so that they could get it and, you know, replace the one they have and so there's a cycle of power going on might not be a bad idea, especially when people are panicking.
My loved ones love their TV shows when they want them on. And if the remote stops working, we gotta have a solution to that. So think about that. If you're doing it, that is a.
[00:24:00] Speaker A: Super, super recommendation too. In fact, you know, I do that at the house. I do my own. My own. I have a ton of rechargeable AAAs and double A's that I use all over the house for different things like remotes or some small lights or even.
Even. Gosh, it'll come back to me later. I don't remember. There's a ton of things I use those things for. But, yeah, I think that's a great idea. There's thermostats. Thermostats. Oh, yeah, thermostats are a good point.
That is. That's a. That's a cut. We'll come back to thermostats here in just a.
So. But power stations, that. That brings me rolling into connectivity and being able to. To make sure that your loved ones got good, good connectivity to the Internet. So in her case, she went to a facility that has great WI fi. The techie person at the place came by really early on, gave me the WI fi password. I was able to set up her phone for that.
But in a lot of cases, there's another relative that I have that lives in a spot where the WI fi is there, but it is terrible. I mean, just really, really bad. So what we ended up doing there was we went out to one of the cell phone providers and talked to them about mobile hotspots. She's a person who really. The only reason she uses the Internet is for some email occasionally. So she doesn't need a lot of data. It's not like she's streaming Netflix or anything like that. And what I found was, is that the little hotspot boxes themselves, if you want to go with something se it are about. I don't know. I think this one was roughly 100 bucks. It may have been a little bit less than that. But the cool thing with at least with the plan that we got her is that she gets something like, I don't know, five to ten gigabits a month. And you know, that's way, way more than she ever needs for email. And it's like 15 bucks a month, which is pretty, pretty reasonable for 5G connected Internet. I think that was just, you know, really, really, really cool. And you know, there's all kinds of levels of that and it varies with what your, what your, your person needs. But that's worked out for us.
[00:26:12] Speaker B: You mentioned 5G. 5G has been a game changer for that. Lt is nice. 3G is not so bad and not so great and 2G is terrible. So make sure you're at the level which can support the things you need. So if you're trying to do the birthday party we were talking about earlier, you kind of need to be in the, in the LTE 5G range to make that work reasonably.
You don't want it to dither too much and to lose audio and things like that. So make sure you have that. The other thing about wireless is there are new technologies of wireless that's anywhere from Wi Fi 4 to Wi Fi 7 that's coming out right now. You really want to be in the Wi Fi 6 or higher item. Especially if you're in a facility where lots of people have devices.
Wi Fi 6 handles that way better than 5.
So if you don't have that, that can be the difference between bad wireless and good wireless.
[00:27:06] Speaker A: That makes a lot of sense.
[00:27:08] Speaker B: So make sure you, you get something that will augment that and talk to your facility about what they have, what they will allow because that really helps you too. And I know you mentioned there are the wireless carriers out there. Anything from 30 to $50 a month can get you some really high end solutions. And if you need to do that then that may be worth it. Especially if you have a loved one like mine who wants to watch football, uses some of those things a little bit more than you might think. And so having that idea about what they want to do is really important.
[00:27:43] Speaker A: So yeah, you need to gauge it based on, based on their needs basically.
And I said the word hotspot. I forgot to mention that you can do hotspot hotspots on your phone. I know you've done that. Maybe you'd like to tell folks about how that works for you.
[00:27:56] Speaker B: Yeah, most carriers have a hotspot plan. It can be anywhere from 10 gig to 50 gig. 50 gig is pretty high. But if you are especially in some of the places that have subscriptions that are tailored toward older users, you can find pretty robust features. And a 10 gig is fine for most people. A heavy user, somebody like me, it doesn't get beyond 50 gig a month. So I think gauging that is a really important thing. Talk to your providers about what they have. Mention who you're doing it for because there are often age related discounts.
[00:28:31] Speaker A: Oh, good point. So for our listeners, how does that work? Do you have to do something on your phone to be able to connect other things, wi fi devices to it?
[00:28:40] Speaker B: Yeah. So it usually is a setting on your phone. I know on Apple's personal hotspot on Android phones there's a related feature as well where you can turn it on and allow things to connect to it. I would not recommend opening up your personal hotspots for anybody to get on it because people do.
[00:28:58] Speaker A: They will.
[00:28:59] Speaker B: They will.
So you want to gear it to devices and you want to preset the devices for your loved ones so that they don't have any issues.
And you can do that in settings. You can prefer a particular one, make sure it connects. You can also test those things out running some items to see how fast you're getting so that you can see what you can and can't do. And they're popular items like speed tests that you can run to see whether your wifi is good enough, whether your personal connection is good enough. And you should be surprised. A lot of good things like Zoom are really engineered to use very low amounts of data in the 1 to 5 megabit range. Something a little more comprehensive like maybe a teams or something like that might get a little high in on that or if you did something with Facebook or if you use some of the higher end items. So just test things, that's the right way and make sure you get a good reception.
[00:29:56] Speaker A: That's great. And you might have to even work with your loved one to adjust their devices a little bit. So in like in my case I'm a Mac user, I've got things syncing to icloud all day long and I've got data flying around all the time and that stuff uses a lot of bandwidth and you may want to do some adjustment on your loved one's machine to make sure that it's not doing things in the background to suck up a lot of bandwidth that you're paying for every month. So you know, that's a thought.
[00:30:27] Speaker B: What do we mean by that? We mean things like if you're storing music on your in our Music account on Apple that sometimes you can actually push it off to be in a cloud rather as having it on store. If your WI fi is bad, you might want to put things on the machine so you don't have to worry about that and think about that from that point of view. So knowing what your transport means are and adjusting accordingly really make a difference for them. And again, you know it, things can change. So check, don't assume you do it once and that's the way it's always going to be. Check it regularly. So did you know what's going on?
[00:31:08] Speaker A: Yeah. Pay attention to that sort of thing if you can.
So this makes me think about. We've talked a fair amount about tech today and we're, you know, we're pretty tech focused. So that's, that's near and dear to our heart. But I wanted to talk about something a little bit different today about trying to take care of yourself as a caregiver. Even when you're, when your folks are kind of settled, maybe they are in care or they're in a, in a position where they're a little bit more taken care of than they have been quite a while.
There's an experience that, that I experienced after my mother passed away and after, you know, she, my mother was, was sick for a long time and there was a lot of stress around when she was really, really sick. And you know, that the end was not that my dad was having a lot of stress, I was having a lot of stress kind of working through all that. But once she had passed away and we had gone through the funeral and we had gone through a lot of that kind of, you know, end of life detail and getting things settled and even getting to the point where my dad was fairly settled with his finances and getting things where they needed to be on autopilot and all that, I found myself in a position where things were handled but I was still super stressed and I couldn't quite figure out what was going on. And in my case, I'm going to go ahead and say it to our listeners because I recommend it.
I went and got therapy. In fact I used one of the online therapy things called BetterHelp. This is not a commercial for BetterHelp. It's just a personal experience and I met with therapist for a couple of months and actually really liked it. She helped me a lot and one of the things she taught me me was that when you've been in a stressful situation for a long time and your body has kind of been keyed up for a long time. It thinks that that is the default.
And once the stressors are gone, your body still thinks that that's the default. And it will try to find things to make you feel like it needs to be make to make it feel stressed. You'll start worrying about things you'll be trying to find. You'll feel like something's wrong when there is nothing wrong. And there are some very cool relaxation techniques that she taught me about. You know, there some of them around meditation, some of them are about being aware of your body, tensing part of your body and relaxing them, tensing another part of your body and relaxing them and practicing that for a while. And the whole point is, is to teach your body in your brain that it's okay to relax and it helps you reset what normal looks like. When stress has been. When stress has been the normal for years and then suddenly you don't have it. It takes a little while for your brain and your body to reset. And if you're out there and you're experiencing something similar, I could say that online therapy helped me. It helped my brain and it's helped me in a lot of way. If you get a chance, don't be afraid. Give it a shot if you can. Online is one thing. There are a lot of, you know, folks that are there a lot of therapists around in localities where you can go and just do that one on one if you want to. I will say that online therapy is a lot less expensive in a lot of cases than it is to go and sit with a person. And in the advent of zoom over since COVID it's really kind of picked up because you're really just talking to another person. You don't have to be in the same room with them and they're bound by all the same kind of privacy things that normal therapists are. Have you experienced anything like that, that whole stress, stress response? I.
[00:35:00] Speaker B: It sounds very familiar to me. You know, me and my first rule of caregiving is take care of yourself. Yep. So I think having these kind of conversations and I really relate to the idea that you have to often put yourself and reset yourself back to where what relax is, is. I want to mention that there are lots of things you can do. Online therapy is great and maybe you can't do it because of the moment or you want to do something right now. There are plenty of things on tech in your watch that you can take a moment and do a breathing meditation that can guide you through to even on things on your phone or computer that are really fun to have, even just watching a relaxing scene.
And there's lots of ways you can do that on YouTube and lots of different places where you take a minute or two and just, you know, experience a relaxable time and that minute can be very helpful to you. And so, and even having a conversation where you talk to people on say, a podcast that tells you about that kind of stuff would be really cool and by the way, very cool, since you wanted we talk about, about that. It would be really nice if you really enjoyed this conversation for you to go ahead and like and subscribe on this and tell us how would you want what you, what you think of us? Give us a review, Let us know how we're doing. We take feedback. Well, I think we all believe feedback.
That was really nice, huh?
[00:36:25] Speaker A: That's fantastic. Yeah. And if you could, you know, we have received some great reviews on Apple podcasts and on Spotify, so, you know, tell your friends and we'd really appreciate that sort of thing.
