Already Toast Quotes

“I'd estimate that my caregiving in the summer of 2016 took up at least thirty hours a week and likely more. For the first several weeks after Brad's discharge I was on eight to ten phone calls a day related to his care. ”
― Kate Washington, Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America

“What chafed the most was not the private demands from my husband, but the public, official ones from nurses, doctors, and therapists, many of whom seemed to discount my personhood in any other realm than as a caregiver. I wanted them to recognize my humanity. I felt, on every level, unseen in my life, even as I was holding together the lives of four people. The longer I acted as a caregiver, the angrier I found myself at that erasure.”
― Kate Washington, Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America

“Caregivers aren’t supported, and America overlooks their importance.”9”
― Kate Washington, Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America

“The real question is not how my family could afford care, but how anyone in the US can bear the economic burden of caregiving.”
― Kate Washington, Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America

“In 2010 the ratio of potential caregivers ( aged forty-five to sixty-four) to every individual aged eighty and up was seven to one. By 2050, one study predicted, that "caregivers support ratio" to three to one.”
― Kate Washington, Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America

“It's easy to see how burnout can result from such overreliance on a single caregiver, and I am convinced it was a factor in mine.”
― Kate Washington, Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America

“According to the Family Caregivers Alliance, 46 percent of caregivers providing "complex chronic care perform medical and nursing tasks." Moreover, a majority felt they had no choice because nobody else would do it and/or insurance wouldn't pay for professional service.”
― Kate Washington, Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America

“I once received an Explanation of Benefits statement showing that the billed services for a few weeks in the BMTU were more than $3 million. It seems shocking that the medical system can't spare dollar figures in the thousands to pay for professional in-home care. If a medical professional tells the family that the patient has a medical need for twenty-four hour care attendance, as Dr. T did, it doesn't make sense that that very very attendance is a noncovered expense.”
― Kate Washington, Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America

“It's a bitter irony, since in-home healthcare is enormously cheaper than hospitalization--and good home assistance can prevent the falls, injuries, or infections that could easily land a fragile patient right back in the hospital.”
― Kate Washington, Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America

“Over the course of that summer I paid Nancy and Emali a total of about $40,000, not a penny of it covered by insurance.”
― Kate Washington, Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America

“Getting Brad out of the car took strength: I offered a hand, he leaned hard, and I pulled. His walk was a slow, slow shuffle. I warned him of the uneven pavement, the loose bricks. Step by agonized step we made our way to the side door. His foot caught on the high door frame as he tried to step up. He made it and there was a pause on the landing. My mother-in-law was waiting for us, stood above him, and I below, as he made his way up the stairs to the living room. It seemed to take hours. We led him to the couch. I have a picture of him lying there, that fired day, pallid and exhausted. I was tired too, not for the physical effort as he was but for the mental and emotional strain of coordinating this homecoming. He fell asleep, I started a load of laundry and sat down to begin organizing his thirty-five prescriptions according to the complex chart from the hospital pharmacist.”
― Kate Washington, Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America

“The possibility of Brad coming home became ever more real as April turned to May. As tired as we all were of the hospital, his care needs were overwhelming. He was still visually impaired and his tarsorrhaphy, which required a good two hours of hands-on care per day, was still in place. He was on intravenous nutrition for ten hours a day. He couldn't walk, shower, use the toilet, or dress independently, much less prepare food for himself. His hands shook with tremors from neuropathy. I was shocked to learn what kinds of care I was expected to administer, just as I had been the year before when Brad went home on IV antibiotics.”
― Kate Washington, Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America

“Privately, though, I wasn't sure I could cope. The faux-upbeat quasi-realism I employed in our blog was spilling into my relationship with my husband. I felt like a shell of a person--like a robot, carrying out my duty most of the time, unable to feel much as I did it. The peculiar feeling of alienation was heightened by having others all around me nearly all the time, even at home, but not feeling I could confide in any of them.”
― Kate Washington, Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America

“In recent decades, the medical establishment has increasingly outsourced relatively complex at-home care tasks to family caregivers, often with little training.”
― Kate Washington, Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America

“He came home in late May badly weakened and visibly ill, with high treatment needs at home. He'd lost more weight and color in the hospital and he moved slowly. He also came home on oxygen and ultra-strong IV antibiotics-- his lungs was still filled with a thick fluid and was at high risk of serious infection. I was floored when I learned that I was expected to administer these antibiotics three times a day, through his PICC line. In addition he came home with complex regimen of well over a dozen medications, and it fell on me to fill his extra-large pill box and refill his prescriptions.”
― Kate Washington, Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America

“When Brad and I had moved to Sacramento for his job, I had resigned myself to caring for my mom in her declining years. She had moved to Sacramento from my smaller hometown, not far away, after I graduated from high school. I never intended to end up back in Sacramento Valley, but that's where my husband found a tenure-track position. When we relocated, I quit my job as associate food editor at a Bay Area-based magazine, and I was worried I wouldn't be able to find writing work in the smaller Sacramento area.”
― Kate Washington, Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America