An Unforgettable Conversation About Sweet Tea

Hey, this is Peter Rosenberger, and sometimes I get callers to the program who are unforgettable, and Henry was one of those callers. It was some years ago, and I went back into the archives, and we talked about sweet tea. If you're from the South, like I am, you understand the importance of sweet tea, and I wanted you to hear this conversation that Henry and I had about sweet tea. His wife originally called, and when I talked to her for just a few moments, I realized that Henry was the one that needed to be on the phone, and so we had a great conversation.

Let's go to Charlita in Texas. Charlita, how are you feeling? I'm here by the grace of God, and just love listening to your speeches. Well, tell me what's going on with you. Okay, I have neuropathy, and my husband, he's here, and he's really my 100% caregiver. Your husband is your caregiver?

Right. All right, so why isn't he calling? Well, he's listening. Well, put him on the phone. Let's talk to him.

Okay, just a minute. The show is Hope for the Caregiver. That's what the show is about. Well, how far away was he, Charlita? Oh, okay, he has back problems too, but here he is.

All right, well put him on. Hello? Tell me your name, sir.

My name is Henry. Henry, you're taking care of your wife. How are you feeling today? Well, I'm feeling just about as bad as she is, but I'm still hanging in here with her. What are you doing to help you? Well, not too much.

I help her mostly. Well, have you been to see your doctor lately? Yes, I saw my doctor lately, and he said I was doing fine, but... Well, you might want to consider different doctors. It doesn't sound like you're doing fine.

Well, when I get back here at home, that's when the work starts. Yes, it does. Do you have anybody helping you with Charlita? No, just me. I don't think she wants nobody else. Is there somebody that could? Yeah, there's somebody who can, yeah.

All right, who is that person? We have kids. All right, let one of those kids come over and share the load while you get a little bit of rest. I need some rest.

Yes, you do. I can hear it in your voice. I can't get rest without taking some kind of substance, a pill or something. If I don't take that, I'll be up all night long. Are you cutting out your coffee? No, I still drink coffee.

What's your cutoff time of the day for coffee? Well, I just drink a cup when I get up in the morning, and that's it. All right, you're not drinking it at night?

No. What about sweet tea? Sweet tea is my favorite.

I drink that all the time. Well, what's your cutoff time for sweet tea? After dinner. All right, why don't we cut it off a little bit before dinner? Because you're gonna stay up all night because of the sweet tea, and then you got to take a pill to go to sleep.

Now, how's that working for you? Well, that's sugar, and that pill, I don't guess it makes, but I do go to sleep. Well, yeah, if you take a pill, you'll go to sleep. How much more sleep if you were able to back off of some of that sweet tea? How much sleep am I able to get if I back off the sweet tea? Yeah, you think you'd be able to sleep a little better without a pill?

Well, I had never tried it, but... Hey, you know what? Let's put everything on the table and see what we can do to help you get through the night without having to take so many pills. Your doctor says you're doing well, but you're drinking sweet tea all day long, then you're having to take a pill to get to sleep at night.

Right. Now, I got to tell you here, I'm kind of wondering about your doctor, if he doesn't know the whole picture or what's going on with him, because if you're able to take a pill at night, but you're loading up on sugar and caffeine, taking liquid sugar and caffeine, but you're taking a pill to go to sleep, that doesn't sound like a good combination, does it? It don't sound like one, no. But that's what's going on, and you're going to stay tired. It seems like I'm tired all the time.

Well, you are tired all the time. So let's take two things. Let's do two things.

What's that? It's just two simple things. Let's see if we can't back off on the sweet tea and the sugar. Don't have to get it completely out of your system.

You didn't get here overnight, you're not going to get out of it overnight. But let's see if we can back it off and not drink it after a certain time of night. Maybe after six o'clock at night, you're done with sweet tea and caffeine and sugar. Right.

All right. And let your body just normally go on to sleep and see if that could start helping. Now, you may have to take a pill for a little while, you may get a little bit of a headache as you start backing that off. But eventually, if you could start substituting water for sweet tea, you're going to probably find your body is going to react differently and feel better about this.

It's going to take a while because you've trained your body in a certain way. Then the second thing is, let's see if we can't get some help in here to help you take care of Charlita. Well, that's what I'm working on. She comes every so often and helped me out, but that's not enough. Well, let's ask her to step up a little bit.

Yeah. Let's ask her to step up. Now, Charlita's going to, she may give you a little bit of pushback on that.

And that's okay. Tell Charlita, say, look, if I, if what, see, let me ask you something, Henry. If you were to go down today, if something happened to you, you had a heart attack, you had a stroke, you're not doing well, all those things, anything that happened to you, you get a sprained ankle. What's going to happen to Charlita? She won't be taken care of because I've been laid up.

There you go. So we have, what we're trying to do on this show is, is to help caregivers understand that the priority is for the caregiver to stay healthy, emotionally, physically, financially, spiritually, professionally, all the above. That's not selfish. That's stewardship.

That's you doing, you're taking care of the one person that's standing between her and even worse problems. Right. You follow me? Yeah, I follow you. All right. Now listen, do you ever, there's a, I want you to, if you can, my book comes out next month in bookstores across the country. You can get it right now on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and so forth. It's called Seven Caregiver Landmines and how you can avoid them.

Seven Caregiver Landmines. It's a very simple book. It's so easy. You could read it in the bathroom because that's where I wrote it. Yeah. That's where I've been most of my reading at. So what I want you to do Henry is start backing off on you trying to do everything you possibly can, wear yourself out and then take a pill at night to go to bed.

If you can start making simple changes in this, just to back it off a little bit, back off of that caffeine and sugar a little bit in the evening times and then start reaching out and asking your daughter and, and, and other children, I don't know how many children you have, but asking them to help share the load a little bit and say, look, I've got to take care of myself because if I go down, you guys get, you guys get mom all by yourself. Right. And they may get both of you in the mixed. Yeah.

You right about that. So now what about your church situation? Are you going to church? Well, we ain't going to church right now because what about you?

Can you go to church? Well, I can. Yeah.

Yep. All right. Well, why don't you go? Well, that sounds good.

I think it is good. And you can get away for about an hour, hour and a half, and you can go over to church and get you. You're not only getting your, your, your, uh, you're going to take care of your stuff with your body, but now you're going to take care of your stuff with your spirit. Right. Okay. See Henry, here's the deal. Healthy caregivers make better caregivers in order for you to be healthy. We can't just look at one thing.

We've got to hit a lot of markers here. Your body, your spirit, your wallet, all those things have to be healthy. I've got to go take a quick break. We got to go to a break.

Henry keep listening to the show. Okay. Okay. All right. This is hope for the caregiver. This is Peter Rosenberger.