There are many ideas that slip into the way we discuss caregiving, often without our noticing. One of them is the idea that there is the giver of care and the recipient of care, two distinct people with two distinct roles. The care recipient is defined by their limits and their needs. The giver of care, on the other hand, is assumed to not have limits or needs. The giver of care is expected to provide whatever the care recipient needs.
Even those of us who know better often find ourselves assuming that the giver of care isn’t themselves chronically ill or disabled. Which, given the statistics and our experiences, we know is rarely the case. Most caregivers are managing their own health issues and limitations. Even if they’re perfectly healthy when they first become a giver of care, the inevitability of being human means the giver of care will need to receive care at some point. When we rely on people to somehow not have limits or needs, we’re asking the impossible.
This oversight, combined with the way systems intentionally make respite and residential care difficult to access, is a real issue. When our culture drives us to push ourselves past our limits and when accessing support takes months (or years) of fighting, people find themselves in impossible situations. We need to stop blaming ourselves and each other for the dangerous situations we find ourselves in:
I’ve met many people who are caregivers to a former partner and former in-laws. Here’s the story of how one woman and her husband have remained committed to her ex-husband.
It's not just your or your family's medical bills you can be stuck on the hook for. People are finding themselves being billed for stranger's medical treatment due to medical identity theft.