The Costly, Painful, Lonely Burden of Care - The New York Times - 0 views
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The Costly, Painful, Lonely Burden of Care
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Health care in the U.S. relies on an “invisible army” of caregivers — mostly women. For many, stunted careers, lost earnings and exhaustion are part of the fallout.
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“If society wants us to keep caring for others, it’s going to have to show a little more care for us.”
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Her husband, Brad Buchanan, was late for family dinner. She found him in the bathroom, coughing up blood — a lot of it.
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Doctors found that a tumor had ruptured in one of his lungs and he urgently needed chemo. As her husband became critically ill, Ms. Washington, a freelance writer, was thrust into the role of nurse.
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“My hands were shaking,” she said as she remembered apprehensively pushing in the drugs for the first time and feeling the weight of keeping her husband alive.
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Mr. Buchanan had a stem cell transplant that left him with graft-versus-host disease
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they tend to do more personal care tasks like helping patients bathe and use the toilet than their male counterparts, who are more likely to oversee finances and arrangement of care.
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When she explained that she had two children who also had needs, he said, “Well, usually family steps in, and it works out fine.”
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Ms. Washington felt the burden of responsibility, but also the sting
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The U.S. health care system relies on and takes for granted the “invisible army” of people — mostly women — who keep the system functioning by performing home care for the many people who are “too well for the hospital” but “too sick for home,” as well as for those on end-of-life care.
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In 2017, AARP found that about 41 million family caregivers in America perform roughly $470 billion worth of unpaid labor a year.
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Depending on the analysis, between 61 and 75 percent of caregivers are women
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The historical roots are complex, but as Evelyn Glenn puts it in “Forced to Care,”
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emale caregivers put in more hours — 22 to men’s 17
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A doctor told Ms. Washington that her husband would need 24-hour care and “could not be left alone for even a moment.”
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Many people who take on caregiving roles experience negative health impacts, but women are especially at risk of the fallout from caregiver stress.
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Female caregivers are also 2.5 times more likely to live in poverty as non-caregiver
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A 2011 study found that women who left their jobs to care for a parent lost an average of $324,000 in wages and benefits over their lifetimes.
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Ms. Washington was able to dip into savings and a recent inheritance to help pay for supplemental in-home care, but it was still a struggle, causing stress, resentment and lost income.
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It was hard to have my life put on hold. Everything kind of slipped away.
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I lost a sense of who I was. I was going to pick up a prescription for myself, the only prescription I had when my husband was sick, and the pharmacist asked for my date of birth, and I gave his date of birth
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People talk about how it’s the most important job in the world, taking care of our children or taking care of our vulnerable elders, and yet those are some of the worst paid jobs.
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How much is a quarterback paid versus someone who is doing care for a vulnerable elderly person?
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How did care work become so undervalued?
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they are also more likely to stand by their partner through a serious illness
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Western culture has long framed care work done by women as a moral duty or obligation, rather than an economic activity.
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If your earnings are lower than they would normally be because you’re busy caring for a family member, and you can’t save and pay into social security, it can lock whole families into a cycle of lower wealth and economic instability.
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And what should someone not do
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Don’t tell someone to stay positive. For me, there was no staying about it, because I didn’t feel positive to start with. It brought up this feeling
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My time isn’t my own, but surely my emotions can be
