(CNN) — Whenever Felicia Hudson gets overwhelmed juggling a full-time job and caring for her ailing father, she finds solace in a piece of paper hanging in her office.

“Circumstances do not cause anger, nervousness, worry or depression … it is how we handle situations that allow these adverse moods,” it says. “We actually choose our own attitudes. I choose to be calm, well-adjusted and happy!”
She can’t remember where she found the motto, but focusing on it is one of several coping mechanisms Hudson has developed since she took her father out of a nursing home in July 2008 and moved him into her two-bedroom apartment in San Diego.

By then, Alvin Hudson had suffered three strokes and been diagnosed with diabetes, kidney failure and renal disease, requiring a long list of medication and dialysis three times a week.
It was only a matter of days before Hudson became overwhelmed, she says.
“It was like, ‘oh my, what did I get myself into?’” the 51-year-old Georgia native recalls. “Sometimes, I would just go into the bathroom and cry.”

She laughs about it now, but in the beginning, “it was horrible,” she says.

She’d go to her job at a manufacturing plant at 8 a.m., leaving at lunch three times a week to bring her father to a dialysis center. She’d return to work and stay late to make up the time, and then go back to the center to pick him up. Those were just the normal days. If he had an extra appointment with the dentist, podiatrist or general practitioner, she took the day off to shuttle him around and sit in waiting rooms.

“I put my life on hold,” she said. “I was trying to do it all.”

It’s a scenario familiar to many across the United States as adult children become caregivers for aging and chronically ill loved ones.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/16/living/caregiver-stress-report/index.html