A weird throat pain, bad breath, an inflamed tonsil. A reassuring GP saying it can probably wait a few days, but it wouldn’t hurt to go to the ER. I’m slightly reassured when we get to the em…

Sometimes it’s just one thing after another, for months and then years. How do you make it through? In October, I lost my grandma. She had parkinson’s and dementia and had slowly been d…

I’ve just been skimming through The Caregiving Wife’s Handbook: Caring for Your Seriously Ill Husband, Caring for Yourself by Diana B. Denholm and I already like the approach she takes.…

“I remembered how absolutely terrified I was at the beginning,” said Susan Jewett, 76, who first proposed the mentoring idea to Penn Memory after her husband’s death in 2020. Her pitch: “Maybe I co…

The week we move in together, Pam breaks her leg. They call it a fragile fracture, and I argue about the word fragile. “Why fragile? This woman right here runs marathons. She’s not fragile.” I’m pi…

New relationships – whether romantic, sexual, or both – are almost always exciting, no matter who you are. But for people with disabilities in relationships with neurotypical, nondisabl…

On a recent visit with research participants for my book on spousal caregiving, I sat with a man who had a stroke three years ago, at age 59. He can only use one side of his body, rendering him una…

In September 2020, I watched from afar as Andrew and his wife, Rachel, announced that their infant daughter, Francesca was diagnosed with an atypical teratoid rhabdoid tumor in her brain. Via his T…

They say that the closest job to being a hero is being a president. Presidents do not have time for their family, they put the country first before themselves and are always at the edge of stopping…

It’s easier to sink than swim. That’s what they don’t tell you. But sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between sinking and floating stagnant. Caregiving threw me from the stagnation I succu…

I wanted to create a sense of stability while my children, then 8 and 11, were still innocent enough to believe that life could be stable. I wanted to create a sense of hope while my husband, Jonat…

Helping seniors leave the home they’ve lived in for decades isn’t easy. “They second-guess themselves right up to the day of the move,” says Gunton. They look around and reminisce — sorting through…

So we ennoble narratives of caregiving while simultaneously rating it low priority. The professionals — child care and elder care providers, most of them women of color, many of them immigrants — w…

As a person with the mental illness disability of schizoaffective disorder, I am quite familiar with the inpatient mental hospital experience. I have frequently devolved into crisis and found mysel…

Caregiving professionals are ought to inspire more trust than the average employee, as every client will be emotionally involved in the entire collaboration. More often than not, you’ll have to tak…

Federal and state policymakers increasingly are interested in creating a public social insurance program for long-term care in the US. Even some Democratic presidential hopefuls have raised the iss…

Is caregiver burnout real? What causes it? Is it really just selfishness? How do you avoid it? What do you do if you have it? Here’s my take on the facts and fiction of crashing out as a care…

“Society tends to say that if you have a chronic illness or disability, then you’re not sexual. That’s a big misconception,” Dr. Phillips tells Teen Vogue. “What we have to understand is that with …

“I am in a bind. I have a problem and I need your help,” came the voice over the telephone. My husband and I had just sat down to a late night dinner after a long day of his highly concentrating wo…

The B.C. government is taking over as the employer of all long-term care workers in the province in response to the COVID-19 threat in seniors’ homes. Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry sai…