• The Road to Burnout City & Back: A Caregiver’s Perspectives & Practical Tips

    Where to begin? Let me start by sharing that I am thankfully not burned out right now, so this post won’t be written from a place of complete exhaustion. That said, there’s no mistaking I have experienced an extreme burnout once along my caregiver/patient advocate journey since June 2018 – not to mention what I’ll call mini-burnouts. Regardless, I haven’t forgotten how I felt, though a sense of feeling for me was especially difficult to access at those times.   It’s often said that burnout is right at the top of concerns for caregiver/patient advocates, but not necessarily by them. I believe the reasons for that are as endless as personalities, but there seems to be a common thread. Caregiver/patient advocates are fueled by easing…

  • Kidneys and Lungs and Heart, Oh My!

    Well, after a soft launch of 1 Day 1 Week this past Monday (August 30) to a network of friends, some future topics that were requested included: Denial vs. Dealing, Handling the Unknowns, Self-Care, and Caregiver & Patient Conflicting Beliefs / Wishes. Those are among countless topics to write about as standalone blog posts and/or be interwoven into my overall blogging journey! For today, I’m going to focus on Kidneys and Lungs and Heart, Oh My! Did you catch the play on words from the Wizard of Oz? Whether you did or didn’t, it’s from the book/movie’s famous line “Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!” that Dorothy said as she, the Tin Man and Scarecrow entered the dark, creepy forest. The correlation to being…