HELP WANTED! Untrained family member or friend to act as advocate, researcher, care manager,and emotional support for a parent or spouse,sibling or friend,who has been diagnosed with a serious illness or chronic disability. Duties: Make medical decisions, negotiate with insurance companies or Medicare; pay bills; legal work; personal care and entertainment in hospital and rehab. Aftercare at home: Substitute for skilled nurse if injections, IV, oxygen, wound care or tube feedings are required. Long-term care: Medication management, showering, toileting, lifting, transporting, etc. Hours: On demand. Salary and benefits: 0.
This appears on the second page of Chapter 1 of Gail Sheehy's PASSAGES IN CAREGIVING. She spend the remainder of the book into fulfilling the second part of the title: TURNING CHAOS INTO CONFIDENCE.
Based on her personal experiences while caring for her husband for seventeen years, she describes eight turnings that people in caregiving situations experience: Shock and Mobilization (Advocate with Authority); The New Normal (Turn Illness into Opportunity), Boomerang (Summon a Family Meeting), Playing God (Accept What You Cannot Change), "I Can't Do This Anymore!" (Create a Circle of Care), Coming Back (Replenish Your Lifelines), The In-Between Stage (Prepare Your Own Path to Comeback), and The Long Good-Bye (Love is Letting Go, Together). Each section provides not only a description of the stage and a diary of what she and her husband experienced, she talks about other people's experiences and provides very helpful strategies, including resources, for getting through them.
This book is written for the lay person who is trying to find their way through a difficult situation. It lets readers know they are not alone and gives them the tools the easy their burden. While not everyone will have all the experiences or go through all the stages, sometimes the end comes too quickly), there are suggestions that can help whatever stage you and the person for whom you are caring at currently dealing with.
My only suggestion would be to change the last part of the job description. There are immense benefits in being able to care for someone during the difficult periods of caring for them. This book makes the journey less difficult. ( )

Having five years’ experience caregiving to my spouse, I appreciate what Gail Sheehy has set out to do in this book, outline the various phases of the caregiver experience, or “turnings” as she calls them. It’s a comfort to know that others feel what you feel and it’s valuable to know of the resources that Sheehy lists. The generalized trajectory of caregiving is interspersed with Sheehy’s own years-long care for her husband and with the stories of other caregivers, so the lessons are real and heartfelt. I thought several times while I was reading, “I wish someone had told me that before I experienced it!”
That being said, I’m afraid the book is considerably undercut by the rarified social circle lived in by Sheehy and her late husband, magazine editor/publisher Clay Felker. I couldn’t help thinking as I read, “Gee, maybe Tom Wolfe will come read his new essay to my wife, or I could call up Diane Sawyer for her advice, and maybe I’ll get the country’s best surgeons to give us a second opinion.” Mind you, I feel that we have our own wonderful resources for aid, medical and otherwise. How otherworldly Sheehy’s life must seem to so many poor and isolated caregivers who might read this book. I’m afraid that to many, the underlying message of the book will be undercut by the penthouse, the home in the Hamptons, and unwinding at a Mexican health spa.
It was Sheehy’s life, it was her experience, and I can make the argument that it wouldn’t have been honest for her to write it in any other way. And she is a gifted writer, so if you can put these considerations to one side while you read, the book will provide valuable insights, particularly at the outset of the caregiving journey. ( )

In Passages in Caregiving, Gail Sheehy chronicles the psychological, emotional, and logistical stages involved in providing care to chronically ill and dying loved ones.

Part self-help, part resource guide, and part memoir, it’s okay in each part and good in the overall aggregate. The self-help aspect is probably strongest, where readers will recognize themselves in the caregiver stories Sheehy shares to illustrate her continuum of eight caregiver “passages” -- from the initial shock of illness and life’s new normal, through the accumulation of events that can lead to control issues and despair, to acceptance and letting go. The resource-guide aspect is probably weakest -- strategies for each passage are buried throughout the text rather than collected in an easy-reference appendix, and they’re mostly useful to people who are already rich in resources (time, energy, connections, money).

And Sheehy’s personal experience of giving care during her husband’s 17-year illness is somewhere in between. Whereas the stories about other caregivers are easy to read -- illustrative and objective -- her own memoir-ish passages are illustrative but close-in personal. It feels insensitive to admit, but I didn't want to keep diving into Sheehy's deep waters. Those passages are all in italics, and eventually I skipped them and came back, after I finished the book, and read them all together.

It’s a supportive, eye-opening overview of caregiving, a good starting point and best read in advance of needing it.

(Review based on a finished copy of the book provided by the publisher.) ( )

I have extremely mixed feeling about this book.

On the plus side, Sheehy is an excellent writer. Her personal accounts, based on the journals she kept during 17 years of caregiving for her husband, are rich and emotionally spot on. She includes laser-sharp analyses of the financial incentives that keep the current healthcare system doing what it's doing for the chronically or terminally ill, most of which give no advantage whatsoever to the caregiver at home, the family, or--all too often--the patient. It really helped me understand what's going on with care for my husband.

On the down side, so many of her practical suggestions are staggeringly useless unless you are in as high an income bracket as she. Take care of yourself by taking a week to go to a spa every year. Yeah, in my dreams. Hire your own round-the-clock staff. Right. Let's see, divide my income by 24/7--oops, that's a little short of the $15-$20/hr she suggests you pay them. Move your residence to wherever doctor du jour happens to be, but still maintain your other two homes. My goodness, why didn't I think of that?

Tell me, what do the simple folk do? ( )