What Can Your Senior Do about the Emotional Impact of COPD?

The emotional ramifications of COPD can be complicated. There’s a lot to deal with physically, but then the emotional side of things can add fuel to the fire. Learning how to manage her feelings about COPD and her health overall can be incredibly helpful for your elderly family member. These tips can give her a way to start determining what will work best for her particular situation.

Consider Pulmonary Rehabilitation

Elderly Care Chaney, WA: Emotional Impact of COPD

Pulmonary rehabilitation is a comprehensive program that can do so much for someone with COPD. It’s first of all an educational program, which can help your senior to understand what’s happening with her lungs and what helps her to feel better. It also includes physical therapy, breathing exercises, and other tools that can help her to deal with how COPD makes her feel.

Talk Therapy Might Be a Good Idea

Beyond pulmonary rehab, your senior might want to consider attending talk therapy sessions. She might do this on an individual basis, one-on-one with a therapist, or she might consider attending a group therapy session with other people who have COPD. This can be beneficial because it allows her to work through the feelings she’s experiencing and learn how to direct them in a more positive way than she might be doing now.

Put a Support Network Together

Having a support system is going to be a really important step for your senior. She’s got you as her caregiver, but it also helps to have all sorts of other support, too. Your senior’s support network could also include family members, friends, and other people who care about her. It can also consist of people who make your senior’s life easier, like elderly care providers. Her support network may grow even more over time.

Get Advice from Her Doctor

Your senior’s doctor can also help you and her to learn how to manage what she’s feeling because of her COPD. Very often anxiety and depression accompany COPD, both because of the physical symptoms and because of the limitations that COPD places on your senior’s life. It’s possible that there may be medications that her doctor can prescribe to help your elderly family member to manage her feelings a little more easily.

Every day with COPD is a little bit different and can impact your senior differently on an emotional level, too. Having a plan for dealing with those emotions is really crucial.

If you or an aging loved-one is considering Elderly Care in Chaney, WA please contact the caring staff at Angel Senior Care today at (509) 326-4357.

Vaughn & Donna Young