Already Toast
Caregiving and Burnout in America
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Washington chronicles in her wrenching debut the devastating ordeal of her husband being diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma and the two years she spent, from 2016 to 2018, taking care of him during treatment. Her life became a blur of doctors' appointments, battles with insurance companies, juggling dozens of prescriptions, and learning to administer IVs. The work was all-consuming and led to a strained marriage that "felt less like a ballast keeping me on an even keel and more like a weight so heavy it could sink me." After a stem-cell transplant, Washington writes, her husband saw a limited recovery but still lives with a chronically weakened immune system from chemotherapy. Her account ends with a persuasive plea for a federally funded caregiving stimulus plan, citing president-elect Joe Biden's recent statement: "We're trapped in a caregiving crisis, within an economic crisis, within a healthcare crisis." Throughout, Washington notes the gender disparity among caregivers; with three-quarters of caregivers being women, Washington writes, "There was an implication that the only point of me, as a human, and especially as a woman, was to care for another person. What about my own life? Didn't I deserve care?" Washington's tale serves as both an evocative memoir and a strident call to action.