Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America

Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America

by Kate Washington
Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America

Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America

by Kate Washington

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Overview

The story of one woman’s struggle to care for her seriously ill husband—and a revealing look at the role unpaid family caregivers play in a society that fails to provide them with structural support.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780807011751
Publisher: Beacon Press
Publication date: 03/16/2021
Sold by: Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format: eBook
Pages: 224
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Kate Washington is an essayist and food writer who currently serves as the dining critic for The Sacramento Bee. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The Washington Post, Eater, Catapult, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. She lives in Northern California. Connect with her at kawashington.com and on Twitter (washingtonkate).

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
Collateral Damage

CHAPTER ONE
The Learning Curve: Beginning Caregiving

CHAPTER TWO
The Thick of It: BMTU, Part One

CHAPTER THREE
On His Blindness: BMTU, Part Two

CHAPTER FOUR
Careworn: Life After Discharge

CHAPTER FIVE
To a Crisp: Burnout

CHAPTER SIX
Invaluable: Work and the Economics of Caring

CHAPTER SEVEN
A Lack of Reasonable Options: Sandwiched Caregiving

CHAPTER EIGHT
Something Is Not Right: Post-Caregiving Stress

CHAPTER NINE
The Aftermath: Rebuilding from Caregiving

CONCLUSION
Damage Control: How to (Really) Help Caregivers

Key Sources and Resources
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
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