Eleven months as my husband's carer and this week I have nothing left. How do you all keep going?

#1Moira G.(Joined Mar 2026 · 5 posts)April 19, 2026, 9:37 pm

My husband had his stroke last May, three weeks after he retired. He is doing well, everyone keeps telling me how well he is doing, and they are right, and I am so tired I cried in the supermarket on Tuesday because they had moved the bread.

I do the exercises with him every morning because the therapist said repetition matters. I drive to the appointments, I chase the appointments, I fill in the forms, I cut up food when his hand is having a bad day and pretend I haven't noticed I'm doing it. I still work Thursdays and Fridays. Our daughter helps when she can but she has her own family two hours away.

Here is the thing I can't say out loud to anyone we know: some mornings I resent him. This lovely man who didn't ask for any of this. Then I hate myself for it, and the hating myself is somehow more tiring than the caring.

I'm not even sure what I'm asking. Maybe just, those of you years into this, HOW. What does keeping going actually look like?

#2Geoffswife(Joined Jan 2025 · 38 posts)April 20, 2026, 9:12 am

Moira G. said:

some mornings I resent him. This lovely man who didn't ask for any of this.

Two years and four months in, and I could have written every word of this at eleven months, including the supermarket. Mine was over a car park ticket machine.

The resentment thing first, because it matters most: it is not a verdict on your marriage or your character. You resent the stroke, and he is standing where the stroke stood. Every carer I have ever spoken to knows that feeling and almost none of us admit it, which is why you got brave and posted it and I'm glad you did.

What keeping going looks like for me, honestly: I took the respite sessions I turned down for the first year because refusing felt like loyalty. I stopped supervising exercises he can do alone, even though he does them slower and worse without me, because the therapist told me straight that my job is wife, not physio assistant. And I walk on Wednesday mornings with two women I met in a hospital corridor, and we talk about anything except strokes.

It gets different. Not lighter exactly, but you get stronger at carrying it, and then bits of him come back and take some of the weight themselves.

#3keithb57(Joined Oct 2024 · 51 posts)April 21, 2026, 6:40 pm

Survivor here rather than a carer, so take this from the other side of the bed.

Three years ago my wife was you. What I know now, and didn't let myself see then, is that she was drowning quietly while telling everyone she was fine, because all the attention, all the appointments, all the "how is he doing" was pointed at me. Nobody asked about her for a year.

The thing that changed it wasn't anything dramatic. I got well enough to notice, and I told her to go back to her choir on Tuesday nights, and I sat with the risk of being alone in the house for two hours. Both of us needed that more than another two hours of supervised exercises.

Your husband may be further from noticing than I was. So I'm saying it on his behalf: the resentment is normal, the exhaustion is real, and he would rather have a wife with a Tuesday night than a carer with nothing left. Mine told me so.

#4Dr Paul HutchinsClinical moderator(Joined Nov 2024 · 64 posts)April 23, 2026, 8:55 am

Moira, what you have described has a clinical name, carer strain, and rehabilitation teams treat it as part of the patient's picture for a simple reason: when the carer goes down, two people's recovery stalls. You are not failing at the edges of his rehabilitation. You are a load-bearing part of it, and load-bearing structures get maintained.

Three things worth doing with that in mind. Tell his rehabilitation team plainly how you are, in those words, because services for carers often only get offered when someone asks. See your own doctor about your own exhaustion, as a patient, not as his representative. And treat the mornings of resentment as data rather than sin; they usually mean the care plan is asking too much of one person, and the plan is what should change.

The guilt cycle you describe, resenting him and then punishing yourself for it, is one of the most common patterns in stroke households, and it responds to being talked about. The site's piece on the emotional side of stroke recovery covers both chairs, his and yours; the section on carers may read like someone has been watching your kitchen.

What none of us can judge from a forum is where the line sits between ordinary exhaustion and something that needs treating in its own right. That question goes to your doctor, and it is worth asking sooner than feels necessary.

#5Moira G.(Joined Mar 2026 · 5 posts)June 2, 2026, 8:14 pm

Came back to say thank you, properly. I read Geoff's wife's post out loud to my sister and couldn't finish it.

Since April: I told the team, in exactly the words suggested, and it turns out there was a carers' service that nobody had mentioned in eleven months. I have Friday mornings now. My husband, when I finally admitted the resentment mornings to him, said "I'd resent me too" and we laughed until it turned into the other thing, and that was somehow the best conversation we've had since May.

Still tired. But it's Tuesday tomorrow and they can move the bread wherever they like.