Many types of illness and their symptoms, or even medication side effects, can impact your ability to interact with your caregiver or home health worker.   But much too often, your friends, family, nurses, doctors and home care workers seem to expect you to act like a non-ill person!   It is difficult to function normally when your body and mind don't cooperate with you.  When outsiders don't understand these difficulties, it can make simple tasks much more frustrating!

There are so many illnesses, conditions, and med side effects that can affect one's ability to think clearly, to remember things, or even stay wakeful and alert, that it would take numerous pages to detail each one.   A handful of conditions that can lead to problems in interacting or communication are: Stroke, Multiple Sclerosis, Pain, Chronic Fatigue, Depression, etc. etc. The types of medications and their reactions would also be impossible to list, but some meds can cause confusion, forgetfulness, "brain fog" (inability to think or even say what you want to say), sleepiness, dry mouth (which affects speech), malaise (flu-like symptom), and generally make one feel "sick."  Instead of focusing on certain conditions or medicines, I'd like to focus these pages on the various physical, mental, and emotional problems one can experience and how these can impact your home care.  Your condition may require you to list various problems for your home care workers, and ways they can help you work around these problems.

If you have a suggestion for an article in this area, please email me.  If you have a story about how you worked out solutions to problems that helped you deal with caregivers (personal or paid), I'd love to hear from you.