Kate Washington
Autor(a) de Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America
About the Author
Kate Washington's writing has appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, Time, Eater, and Catapult. A frequent speaker about her experience as a caregiver, she lives in Sacramento. Connect with her at kawashington.com and on Twitter (@washingtonkate).
Obras de Kate Washington
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
- Sexo
- female
Membros
Resenhas
Estatísticas
- Obras
- 1
- Membros
- 39
- Popularidade
- #376,657
- Avaliação
- 3.8
- Resenhas
- 2
- ISBNs
- 7
Already Toast shows how all-consuming caregiving can be, how difficult it is to find support, and how the social and literary narratives that have long locked women into providing emotional labor also keep them in unpaid caregiving roles. When Kate Washington and her husband, Brad, learned that he had cancer, they were a young couple: professionals with ascending careers, parents to two small children. Brad’s diagnosis stripped those identities away: he became a patient and she his caregiver.
Brad’s cancer quickly turned aggressive, necessitating a stem-cell transplant that triggered a massive infection, robbing him of his eyesight and nearly of his life. Kate acted as his full-time aide to keep him alive, coordinating his treatments, making doctors’ appointments, calling insurance companies, filling dozens of prescriptions, cleaning commodes, administering IV drugs. She became so burned out that, when she took an online quiz on caregiver self-care, her result cheerily declared: “You’re already toast!”
Through it all, she felt profoundly alone, but, as she later learned, she was in fact one of millions: an invisible army of family caregivers working every day in America, their unpaid labor keeping our troubled healthcare system afloat. Because our culture both romanticizes and erases the realities of care work, few caregivers have shared their stories publicly.
As the baby-boom generation ages, the number of family caregivers will continue to grow. Readable, relatable, timely, and often raw, Already Toast—with its clear call for paying and supporting family caregivers—is a crucial intervention in that conversation, bringing together personal experience with deep research to give voice to those tasked with the overlooked, vital work of caring for the seriously ill.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: There's a slightly dystopian feel to reading this book. It's as though all the parts that were deemed too dark for fictional post-apocalyptic nightmares during the editorial process were snipped out then dumped into this tale. I mean, reading about a young wife and mother whose entire life was redefined by her fit young husband's horrific, aggressive cancer's near-success in driving him into the grave as she worked and raised their kids and managed his increasingly horrific treatments, all while fighting their insurance and medical providers? That's a bridge too far! It's too painful, it's too appalling!
Yet it's completely factual.
But, as insurance-company "care managers" will constantly remind you, "your family will be there for you! After all, you'd do it for them." Newsflash: No, they aren't; and, knowing what I know, I would never, ever do this again.
The love of my life died of AIDS thirty years ago this May. I was in Kate's shoes, sans legal rights, as his bizarre diseases racked up their tolls on him...trying to find answers at that time wasn't the impossible task it was a decade earlier, but it wasn't easy and it's amazing to me how many people will ghost you when you're most in need of support.
Oh yes...that rang a bell. The eternal demands, the unceasing needs, the fact that one simply needs...lunch. A shower. A half hour alone.
I was so very deep into caregiving that I cared not at all. And so was Kate. So are so many, so are the ones who (unlike Kate) can't pay for help and can't rely on anyone...it's a vicious and unforgiving system of "health"care" because it's neither interested in anyone's heath nor in the smallest degree caring.
There is nothing, not one single thing, that I read in this book that did not feel as though it had been ripped out of my brain and splashed onto Kate Washington's computer screen in the mixed gall and bile of my outrage at the horrors of this "system" and the sheer overwhelm of the few who try, really try, to offer helping hands to those drowning in their pain. She clearly understands things now that aren't very fun to know about yourself...where one's limits are, how hard it is to be there, really be there for children...and has come to terms with them. She exists in a new reality. Kate Washington is a different human being now than she was before Brad, her husband, got cancer and became a chronically ill patient.
I encourage anyone who has not faced the worst health crises imaginable to read this book. I encourage you to see, from the inside, how much your fellow human beings are being asked to do. Then I hope I won't need to encourage you to do something, anything, to improve life for these suffering souls, be it spending time or giving money or even haunting GoFundMe and its siblings to do more than the nothing most people do.… (mais)