{"id":82766,"date":"2026-07-21T22:44:17","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T05:44:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=82766"},"modified":"2026-07-21T22:44:17","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T05:44:17","slug":"as-sonoma-county-ages-family-caregivers-face-hidden-health-toll","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=82766","title":{"rendered":"As Sonoma County Ages, Family Caregivers Face Hidden Health Toll"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By<\/span>Selen Ozturk<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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SONOMA, Calif. \u2014 By 2030, nearly one in three Sonoma County residents will be 60 or older. Behind many is a family caregiver whose health may worsen faster than the person receiving care.<\/p>\n

Throughout California, that care is often provided by unpaid spouses, adult children, siblings and neighbors who don\u2019t even think of themselves as caregivers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey don\u2019t begin with the title, they just begin with helping out mom, or a friend or neighbor,\u201d said Connie Nakano, assistant director of the Office of Strategic Initiatives and Equity at the California Department of Aging (CDA), during a July 16 news briefing about family caregivers.<\/p>\n

The event was hosted by the CDA and ACoM at Today & Together, an adult daycare center in Sonoma County. The region has the\u00a0second-highest share<\/a>\u00a0of older adults of any Bay Area county, trailing only Marin by 1%.<\/p>\n

Among people 60 and older, county officials report that close to three in 10 have a disability, compared with roughly one in 10 in the general population.<\/p>\n

Nearly one in five<\/a>\u00a0adult Californians \u2014 over 7 million \u2014 care for someone with a complex medical condition or disability.<\/p>\n

Nearly half of those caregivers have experienced \u201cat least one negative financial impact\u201d because of their responsibilities, a quarter experience seven or more days a month of poor physical health, and four in ten experience high emotional stress while caregiving.<\/p>\n

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Around 50 people, including journalists and advocates gathered in Sonoma on July 16 to hear from a panel of caregivers and experts on the challenges to caregiving and resources available. (Credit: Peter Schurmann)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Barriers to care and self-care<\/strong><\/h2>\n

As these factors compound, many caregivers of people even with chronic degenerative illness show worse health indicators over time than care recipients, explained Alexis Glidewell, program director at the Redwood Caregiver Resource Center, which has worked with family caregivers in Sonoma County for more than two decades.<\/p>\n

Conventional self-care advice can reinforce the problem, she said, describing a client who once pounded a table in her office: \u201cShe said \u2018I don\u2019t want to take care of myself just so I can keep taking care of her.\u2019 And I thought, what are we telling people, that the only value in taking care of themselves is so that they can continue taking care of someone else? It\u2019s dehumanizing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those cared for \u201care getting their doctor\u2019s appointments on time, they\u2019re getting their three meals a day, they\u2019re getting their medications on time, but the caregiver can\u2019t remember if they took their own pill this morning,\u201d Glidewell continued.<\/p>\n

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Alexis Glidewell, program director at the Redwood Caregiver Resource Center. (Credit: Peter Schurmann)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Maisie Hak, a family consultant at Redwood Caregiver Resource Center who helps her mother care for Hak\u2019s grandmother with mixed dementia, said the main barrier to help is family expectations, not lack of resources.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe challenge is getting my parents to accept respite from outside of the home,\u201d she explained. \u201cAnd living in Sonoma County, there\u2019s not a lot of Vietnamese language speakers, and my grandmother only speaks Vietnamese,\u201d making it harder still for her family to trust an outside agency.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat most affects a caregiver is if you are caring for someone 24\/7, as opposed to being able to go in and out. If you have the ability to walk away, it\u2019s very different than if you\u2019re unable,\u201d said Jeanie Schram, a Sonoma resident who cares for her husband of 46 years, Richard, who was diagnosed with dementia about four years ago and attends Today & Together.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople don\u2019t all of a sudden wake up one morning and go, \u2018Oh, my partner has dementia.\u2019 It\u2019s a very slow process. Slowly the invitations stop, slowly the modifications happen. It\u2019s a very insidious, slow process of losing the life that you live,\u201d she continued.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe mantra \u2018you have to take care of yourself,\u2019 is good advice, but it can\u2019t easily be followed, because you never really come first, and it looks like for the rest of your life, you never are going to,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

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Maisie Hak, a family consultant at Redwood Caregiver Resource Center. (Credit: Peter Schurmann)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018We need more respite\u2019<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Johnna Watson, whose mother has frontotemporal dementia and attends Today & Together, said her 31 years in law enforcement trained her for almost any situation except aging.<\/p>\n

Law enforcement officers \u201cdon\u2019t ask for help. We take your problems and we figure out how we\u2019re going to solve them. We have local, state, federal resources, and with these, we can pretty much fix any problem. We can\u2019t fix this. This is one thing that we cannot fix,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Her mother\u2019s progression to stage six of dementia\u2019s seven stages \u201cis the most challenging event that has happened,\u201d she continued. \u201cShe can\u2019t say anything that you will understand. She pretty much talks gibberish \u2026 but since she has been attending here, she literally dances out the door. She paints. She sings. She exercises. She engages. We need more Today & Togethers. We need more respite.\u201d<\/p>\n

Due to the toll, \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of families who put their parents (in a facility) and don\u2019t visit, nobody visits,\u201d said Mirella Alcaraz, who drives 45 minutes from Sonoma to a rehabilitation facility to help care for her father throughout diabetes, dementia and the amputation of both feet.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have six kids, but I have to be here for my father because my dad knew me,\u201d she added, speaking through a Spanish interpreter.<\/p>\n

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Johnna Watson, whose mother has frontotemporal dementia and attends Today & Together, said her 31 years in law enforcement trained her for almost any situation except aging. (Credit: Peter Schurmann)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Theresita Ortiz, who cared for her father until his death and now cares for her 76-year-old mother following a stroke, said \u201cI sometimes don\u2019t know what to do,\u201d describing days when she takes a walk to steady herself before going back in the house. \u201cShe\u2019ll still try to yell at me like I\u2019m still 13 years old because she\u2019s right and I\u2019m wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cStress is a big issue for me, and I do try to manage that with medication, which my mom sometimes understands and doesn\u2019t understand, because she says, \u2018Put everything in God\u2019s hands,\u2019\u201d she continued. \u201cGod isn\u2019t helping right now, but I do my best, and I just wish there were a phone [line] just to call somebody, just to vent.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018You can\u2019t do this alone\u2019<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Sonoma County runs an\u00a0aging resource line, 707-565-INFO<\/a>, that connects callers to a trained listener for anything from finding a day program to building a full caregiving plan, said Joni Huntsperger, the county\u2019s Master Plan for Aging implementation coordinator.<\/p>\n

Her husband, she said, pushes back when she calls caregiving a \u201cjourney\u201d: \u201cEvery time somebody says we\u2019re on a journey, it sounds like there\u2019s going to be elves and hobbits. What it really means is it\u2019s really hard, and you don\u2019t want to do it today \u2026 We\u2019re here to help caregivers still feel like themselves, like you\u2019re not losing yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t do this alone. It\u2019s just like raising children. You have to have a village behind you,\u201d said Christina Gonzalez, executive director of Today & Together, who said a year of non-ambulatory day care in the program \u2014 including medication management, transfers, bathing and feeding assistance \u2014 costs less than one month in a memory care community.<\/p>\n

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\u201cYou can\u2019t do this alone. It\u2019s just like raising children. You have to have a village behind you,\u201d said Christina Gonzalez, executive director of Today & Together. (Credit: Peter Schurmann)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Caregiving compounds financial strain for low-income and immigrant families in Sonoma Valley facing grocery inflation, rent hikes and layoffs in a softening local wine industry, said Leonardo Lobato, executive director of\u00a0La Luz Center.<\/a><\/p>\n

For one client of his Latino community resource center who lost her job, \u201cthe stress of everyday having to look for resources in order to be able to care for loved ones, on top of caregiving, that stress also causes trauma,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He added that many longtime immigrants who arrived in the region as agricultural workers decades ago, whose families remain in their countries of origin, are often aging with no one nearby to care for them at all.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe hear phrases like the \u2018silver tsunami,\u2019\u201d regarding California\u2019s aging population, said Erick Larson, executive director of the Village of Sonoma Valley. \u201cI resist using those because they seem to denote that growing older is a bad thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Real progress, he said, depends on people recognizing the toll of caregiving before it becomes a crisis.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had surgery on my toe that took me by surprise, I was laid up for three months, and that was a rude awakening to what it\u2019s like to be aging. I\u2019m 70 years old, and this was my first experience of \u2018Wow, I\u2019m getting older,\u2019\u201d Larson continued.<\/p>\n

\u201cNone of us really accept that the aging process is happening until we already have an event, either ourselves or someone in our family,\u201d he said. \u201cIf we want to help caregivers \u2026 we need to change that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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