Agile Elder Care – Sprint Abort

Welcome to another article from our daughter, Sarah Wills, who blogs periodically on the topic of “Agile Elder Care.” We hope that her series will encourage people who find themselves taking care of aging parents, grandparents or other loved ones to “not become weary in doing good.” We also hope that introducing you to a way of doing work called “Agile” will help you to provide your loving support in a more effective way, serving their entire mind, body and spirit to the best of your ability.

In His Service,

Brian & Dawn Wills

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This time around I’d like to focus on something a little different. What I’m going to talk about today does not happen often in the software sphere of Agile. Hopefully, it doesn’t happen very often in your experiences caring for elders either. The reality of it may be different. When working with elders, oftentimes we have to not just care for another human being, but we also have to work through tragedy, death, illness, dementia, Alzheimer’s, cancer, all the way to something as seemingly silly as mood swings or the TV being on too often or too loud. I spent the first half of my life surrounded by younger siblings, and since I’m the oldest of seven kids, my parents depended on me a lot to help take care of them. It was a common joke among friends and family alike to call me the “third parent”. I can’t help but notice the similarities between the needs we have at the beginning of life and at the end. The more time I spend in elder care, though, the more I realize how different they can be.

After months of slow improvement and a fantastic week full of hope, my grandfather suddenly lost a lot of weight, mental clarity, memory, and had an attack of gout for the first time all at once. It was a very long night that bled into morning. He did not handle it well and he took his frustration out on me, saying that it didn’t seem as if I loved him. When you are caring for someone with the majority of your effort and time, it hurts a lot to hear something like that. From a caretaker perspective, I had to take a step back to square one. I made sure he had the medical attention he needed, and then prioritized my own self-care. If you’ve been reading my blog, you know that A Sinking Ship Can’t Save People. From a process perspective, we were in the middle of a week-long sprint when this happened. In the software world of Agile, if things change drastically, there is something called a Sprint Abort, where you stop your current Sprint and immediately do a Sprint Planning session to create a new one. This is part of why it’s called Agile – it can react to sudden, drastic change. In this case, my goals of cleaning part of a cluttered room that week, going to the store, doing laundry, and getting grandpa a haircut had to be dropped in favor of talking to his doctor about adjusting his medications and feeding tube intake, getting treatment for his gout, and moving where I sleep to a different level of the house. It’s been several weeks since we did the Sprint Abort, and we’ve followed the normal weekly Sprints ever since, with steady progress and good results.

All this to say, there are good times and bad times in this journey. The bad times can seem very dark, but it’s helpful to know a couple different things. One – you are not alone in this difficulty. Millions of people around the world are struggling with the same things. Two – it is helpful to use a process that lets you come up with a new plan if everything falls apart. Most processes make that feel like failure. No process makes it feel like the end of the world…or at least your world. Agile just makes it feel like another step in the road, another piece of the process to work through with new goals. And honestly, that direction gives some much-needed stability to such an unstable time of life.

Until next time,

Sarah

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