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"Suffering from compassion fatigue does not mean you’re bad at helping or caring, it only means the scale between caring for others and caring for yourself is no longer balanced," [Lynne Hughes] says. "When you're in a role where you're nurturing and caring for others...
Caring for our parents as they age seems like the obvious way to repay them. Yet, some people ask: Can I refuse to care for an elderly parent? The question isn’t as surprising as it might seem. After all, providing care is no small task. It can be draining both...
as of 2020, more than one in six Americans was actively responsible for the daily needs and well-being of a loved one. That number only increased during the Covid-19 pandemic, as families took loved ones out of long-term care, adult day centers closed, and the paid...
Helen Ries was in her forties when her father died in 2011, and then her mother in 2014, a turn of events that left her as the main caregiver for her brother Paul Knoll, who has Down syndrome. Ms. Ries moved her brother, who is now 50, into the Ottawa home she shares...
“Your mother,” he told us, “has multiple sclerosis.” Whatever that was. I carried on with my day like any other on that trip, going swimming, having some beers by the beach. No discernible changes darkened my mood. Looking back, I ask: Had he failed to explain the...
In March 2020, Lori traveled to Florida to help Audrey move into an assisted living facility, a plan that was immediately upended with the arrival of nationwide lockdowns. In the next three months, Lori lived with Audrey in her apartment, sleeping in the same bed with...
Becoming a healthcare assistant (HCA) was a straightforward process. It consisted of several seminars, a half-day course in moving and handling and various online classes about care work. Within two weeks I was on my first shift. The job of the HCA is to do the manual...
Older adults contemplating major surgery often aren’t sure whether to proceed. In many cases, surgery can be lifesaving or improve a senior’s quality of life. But advanced age puts people at greater risk of unwanted outcomes, including difficulty with daily...
Research into caregiving reveals a common sequence of events: caregivers often get depressed, which then makes them more vulnerable to a range of mental health issues. Caregivers are also more likely to not have much support. In some instances, caregivers are more...
This year, I have a Christmas baby. David was born in July, but he is the size of a newborn yet. His cheeks are sweet and pink, but the first thing you will probably notice about our boy would be his cleft lip and palate and his nearly sightless eyes, one smaller than...
There are many surgery prep documents out there that focus on the physical and material aspects of the surgery itself and recovery. The ones from the Gender Confirmation Center by Dr. Scott Mosser may be a good place to start. Their language is on the medical side,...
At a hospital in a Chicago suburb last winter, there were so few nurses that psychiatric patients with Covid were left waiting a full day for beds, and a single aide was on hand to assist with 32 infected patients. Nurses were so distraught about the inadequate...
Every year thousands of children are born with serious yet unexplained health issues. With no diagnosis, they struggle to get medical treatment or much-needed support At six years old, Polly is one of approximately 6,000 children born in the UK each year with a...
I am so good at clearing my son’s airway that I am like Sam-I-Am in Green Eggs and Ham. I can suction on a train. I can suction in the rain. I can suction at the zoo. I can suction, why can’t you? When Lucas was a baby and got the trach, I could not have imagined this...
When her sister died three years ago, Ms. Ingersoll joined the ranks of older Americans considered “kinless”: without partners or spouses, children or siblings. Covid-19 has largely suspended her occasional get-togethers with friends, too. Now, she said, “my social...
After that night, it was clear that while I was taking care of certain tasks, I had no idea how to really help. Books on caregiving don't really prepare you for moments like this. Yes, they have information but how you individually react to the experience, that's all...
A USA TODAY investigation has documented, for the first time, how rarely the federal government enforces decades-old staffing guidelines and rules for nursing homes. Citations and penalties remained sparse even as regulators developed three ways to measure staffing....
Federal officials said they’ve conducted over 1,600 investigations since announcing the crackdown last fall focusing on residential care, nursing facilities, home health services and other employers in the caregiving industry. They found violations in 80% of cases....
When I was 19, a nursing home hired me to work as an aide. There wasn’t much to the interview that I remember, other than I agreed to come to work on time and take the certification course the home provided. In this course, I learned how to lift a frail person out of...
When I tell my mum about my dream, she’s relieved, saying that she’s done everything to invite my grandma’s ghost into our home. For my mum, ghosts are not necessarily a bad thing – they can be, but that’s just like real life, she tells me. The afterlife is just an...
Half of all Americans now die in hospice care. Easy money and a lack of regulation transformed a crusade to provide death with dignity into an industry rife with fraud and exploitation. It might be counterintuitive to run an enterprise that is wholly dependent on...
I’ve always loved the puzzle genre of video games. Starting with the Infocomm text adventures of the early 80’s through Myst and similar adventure games in the 90’s to recent classics like Portal, The Talos Principle, and The Witness, I’ve spent thousands of hours of...
Before my father’s decline, he was a preeminent scholar of Black religious history. As brilliant as he’d been, I wasn’t sure, at the end of his life, that he recognized me. He had died of dementia. Now here I was in quarantine, missing him while also working online...
Domestic and care workers make it possible for the rest of the economy to run. Yet they are an unprotected class of workers, mistreated and underpaid. Domestic workers were left out of the 1935 Fair Labor Standards Act—agriculture and domestic workers were...