TRANSCRIPT 🔗
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The care conference was over.
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And as usual, I left with homework.
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A list of rehab facilities to research.
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Because apparently, once your parent is medically stable, you get promoted to director of Google, phone calls, and making decisions nobody trained you for.
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Luckily, mom has lived in this area for thirty seven years, which meant she had something incredibly valuable.
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Friends, and neighbors, and friends of friends.
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And everybody had an opinion about which rehab was good, which one was okay, and which ones they wouldn't send their worst enemy to.
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So I started making phone calls.
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Most of the places people recommended were either much better on paper than they were in real life, or completely out of our budget.
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So I did what any reasonable person would do.
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I expanded the search area.
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And honestly, I've done this before.
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It worked when I was dating.
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Sometimes you just have to expand your criteria.
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Not necessarily lower your standards.
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Just widen the radius.
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Distance I can work with distance.
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Standards are another matter.
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So while I was researching facilities, making phone calls, checking availability, comparing what they offered, I was feeling like I was actually accomplishing something.
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I had a list.
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I had a plan.
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I was moving things forward.
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And then someone from the administration office stopped by.
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She had some paperwork for me to sign for mom's procedure on Monday.
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I looked at her.
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Excuse me?
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What procedure?
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Apparently, Mom was scheduled for a debridgement on her foot.
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Now if you're like me, you're probably thinking what the hell is a debridgement?
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Basically, there was dead tissue on the top of Mom's foot that needed to be removed to help her wound heal.
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Later that day, I asked the attending physician about it.
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He told me the procedure was actually one of the primary reasons Mom had been sent to the acute care hospital in the first place.
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One of the primary reasons.
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And somehow I had no idea it was happening.
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It had already been planned.
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It was in Mom's chart.
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It was part of the plan before mom was even transferred to the acute care hospital.
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But somehow nobody had mentioned it.
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Not the social worker at the first hospital when we were discussing mom qualifying for the acute care hospital.
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Not during the care conference.
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Not while we were talking about mom's next steps.
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Nobody.
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Apparently, this is how caregiving works.
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Everyone assumes someone else communicated.
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So somehow, I'm the last one to get the memo.
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Now I understand this was considered a minor procedure.
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The podiatrist had already examined mom's foot and told me it was healing nicely.
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It would be done with minimal to moderate sedation.
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It would take less than an hour.
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From a medical standpoint, not a big deal.
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From the caregiver standpoint?
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Are you kidding me?
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Because here's the thing I don't think medical professionals always understand.
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They may see it as one small procedure on a chart.
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I see one more thing added to an already overflowing mental spreadsheet.
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Mom had been through an accident, a broken leg, a hematoma, respiratory problems, oxygen, ventilator, hospital transfers, rehab planning, and now oh by the way, foot procedure on Monday.
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And the most frustrating part wasn't even that she needed it.
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It was that it had been planned all along.
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Which meant I was somehow expected to keep track of something I didn't even know I was supposed to be keeping track of.
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And that's one of the strangest parts of caregiving.
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You can't ask about what you don't know.
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How exactly do you ask about a procedure you didn't know existed?
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How do you catch something that someone else was supposed to tell you about?
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Apparently, I'm supposed to have developed psychic abilities somewhere along the way.
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I wasn't trying to micromanage every medical decision.
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I wasn't expecting someone to hand me a forty-seven page instruction manual.
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Although honestly, I would have read it.
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Probably highlighted it, maybe even laminated it.
Load full transcript
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I was just trying to make sure I knew what was happening to my mom.
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So I signed the papers, I asked the questions I could think of.
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I stayed calm because mom was right there.
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And she didn't need to watch me lose my mind over something that medically was supposed to be relatively minor.
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So I took a breath and added unexpected foot procedure to the growing list of things I was apparently responsible for knowing about.
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And then my brain went somewhere else.
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What else am I missing?
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Because if nobody had told me about something that was apparently one of the primary reasons mom had been sent to the acute care hospital, what else was sitting somewhere in her chart that I didn't know about?
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What else was somebody assuming someone else had told me?
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And this is where the caregiver brain really earns its reputation for being completely unhelpful.
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Now I wasn't just dealing with the thing I had just learned.
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I was mentally opening every other drawer in the hospital, looking for things I didn't know were there.
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And then of course, I had to update the family.
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My sister.
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Pam, my cousin, my uncle.
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Because apparently finding out what was happening to mom wasn't the end of my job.
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I had to update the family news network.
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And of course they all had questions.
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They all went through the exact same reaction I had.
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What procedure?
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Why is she having it?
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When is it happening?
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Why didn't we know about this?
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And honestly, that's the question, isn't it?
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How are any of us supposed to know?
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You can't ask about what you don't know.
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And because I'm the one delivering the information?
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Guess who gets to absorb all of that frustration?
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Yep, me.
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Not because anyone is actually mad at me, but when you're the person who's there.
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When you're the person everyone calls, when you're the person who's supposed to know what's happening, you start to feel like you dropped the ball.
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Like somehow you should have known.
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You should have asked the right question.
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You should have caught it.
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You should have known there was a procedure coming.
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Except how exactly was I supposed to know about something nobody told me about?
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That's another fun little feature of caregiving.
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You can be doing everything you possibly can and still walk away feeling like you screwed something up.
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So now I'm explaining the procedure to everyone while simultaneously trying to convince myself that I didn't somehow fail the family.
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Because apparently when you're the person who's supposed to know everything, not knowing something feels suspiciously like your fault.
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And that it's a whole separate kind of exhaustion.
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There was nothing left to do except get through Monday.
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Mom was fasting again.
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I kissed her goodbye and watched them wheel her away.
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Sound familiar?
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And then I waited.
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Again.
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The good news?
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The procedure went exactly as planned.
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Less than an hour, no drama, no new crisis.
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I'll take it.
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And while all of that was happening, I was still searching for a place for mom to go.
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I found a few that looked promising.
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Then came another caregiver favorite.
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We're not accepting new patients at this time.
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Of course you aren't.
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Why would you be?
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That would make this too easy.
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Eventually I found one that looked like it could work.
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I went to see it.
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I liked it.
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Mom was accepted.
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Finally! We had somewhere to go.
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And for once, I actually knew what was happening next.
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Around here, we're calling that a win.
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Until next time, take care of yourself too.
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I'm the wicked daughter, caring for your aging parent, one meltdown at a time.
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When your friends say cherish this time, you smile while you're losing your mind.
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Was it the pharmacy line or the rush our doctor drive?
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So you swallow that glare with a laugh and a sigh and say, Don't fret, dear.
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We're having the time of our lives.
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Oh, we're having the time.
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The time of our lives.
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Wicked daughter.