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Author Chat with Kate Washington

• Kate Washington and G [Josie] van Londen

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I sit down with Kate Washington to discuss her compelling book, "Already Toast," which delves into the profound and multifaceted caregiving journey. Kate shares her deeply personal experience of caring for her husband as he underwent a stem cell transplantation for lymphoma. We explore the highs and lows, the triumphs and challenges, and the emotional and physical toll that caregiving can take. Through her narrative, Kate provides invaluable insights and reflections that resonate with anyone who has navigated the intricate path of supporting a loved one through a serious illness. Join us for a candid and heartfelt conversation that sheds light on caregiving's often unspoken realities and complexities.

https://www.kawashington.com/already-toast.html 



G van Londen:

Thank you, jen and Wendy, for allowing me to speak tonight with a very special person, kate Washington, who has written this book Already Toast.

G van Londen:

Some of you were here a few months ago also when we spoke with her husband, brent Buchanan, and his horrifying journey through lymphoma treatment and he had quite some terrible complications from that, and he and I speak about both of our journeys on our podcast.

G van Londen:

Kate Washington is telling us tonight about her perspective as a caregiver going through the horrifying experience with her husband, brett Buchanan, and she has written beautifully in this book, I think sometimes even hilariously, because she has a great sense for humor and a great sense of perspective and she is gracious to be so vulnerable in terms of her thoughts and her feelings and her coping mechanisms that have grown over time and this book started when Berette was diagnosed and ended a few years ago. So this book at this point is a few years old, but nevertheless all of the information is very accurate and still up to date and we're hopeful that you will find it validating, empowering and maybe even educational, as she highlights tips for how to help yourself, but also for those who are in those positions to improve caregiver support at society level, because many, if not all, will be caregivers of parents, partners, children, friends, etc. And we have all thruggled our way through it, just making it up as we go, and so, without further ado, I will now give it over to.

Kate Washington:

Kate. Well, thank you so much for that very, very gracious and generous introduction and thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to be with you all this afternoon, where I am I'm in California and this evening, where you all are, to talk a little bit about my book, my journey and really the challenges facing caregivers in the US today, which one of the things that I really want to emphasize and that was a major argument of my book is that they're not just challenges facing caregivers, it's challenges facing the patients and the care recipients as well, because what I argue and I talk about my own story, of course, at length, but what I really tried to do in the book was talk about why the system is so challenging. The healthcare system, the health insurance system, all kinds of larger forces make it so difficult for patients and caregivers alike to get the care and support that everyone needs and deserves. That caregivers for the ill are, or the elderly are, kind of an under-recognized critical force in our society, caring for people who are in a really vulnerable space, whether that's severe illness, elder care need and there's very little support or systemic help for caregivers, and that's bad for the caregivers and the care recipients alike. It makes outcomes worse if caregivers are stressed and unable to carry out their role in a sustainable fashion, and it is also really hard on relationships, on families, on communities.

Kate Washington:

So my argument in this book is not just that I had a challenging time becoming a caregiver which I did at the age of 42, not really expecting to do that at all. I kind of thought, oh, someday down the road I'll care for my mother when she's older she passed away much younger than I expected and I'll care for my mother when she's older. She passed away much younger than I expected. And so I was caring for young children. My husband now former husband Brad and I and we can speak to that at the time of his diagnosis had two girls who were nine and five. They're now one of the older just finished her freshman year of college. So you can see that it's been quite a while and it's been three years since the book came out, but quite a while since his diagnosis. But I was really thinking of caregiving mainly in that context at the time of Brad's diagnosis and the idea that as his symptoms and as the challenges of even just getting him diagnosed kind of snuck up on us, that I would have to give up all my work, really compromise the time that I had available to be a parent and to be a mom to my kids. No leisure time, really nothing outside of the life of caregiving.

Kate Washington:

And he went through bone marrow transplant and his side effects and complications from that were so severe that when he came home after four and a half months in the hospital his physician looked at me. We were in the little room where you gown up because of how severely immune compromised he was. And the physician looked at me and said when he comes home he can't be left alone even for a moment. You need to have eyes on him 24-7. And I said that's not possible. That's not humanly possible for anybody. But also I had kids and people need to sleep and eat and go to the grocery store and have other things in their life besides eyes on a patient 24-7,. I mean, in my view that's kind of what the hospital is for, if that's the level of care that somebody needs. And so I said how am I supposed to do that? And he said well, usually family steps in and it works out fine.

Kate Washington:

And that was a real galvanizing moment for me and I put in the book. I was like I wanted to ask if his family was available, because ours had been already helping and was busy and the idea that 24 hour round the clock, never take your eyes off the patient kind of care could be medically ordered with no support from insurance. Hiring help was not covered by insurance. We got a couple of nursing home care visits a week and because we had an advocate and excellent insurance, we got rehabilitative services that came to our home for Brad because he had lost his vision in the hospital so he needed occupational therapy and all manner of things. But the fact that this could be the case like that you could just say you need to find someone to take care of your husband 24 hours a day, the system can't help you was shocking for me and a really galvanizing moment and I'll. Just.

Kate Washington:

Before we turn to questions, I'll just say that the title of my book I tell early on in the book, but it's called Already Toast, because I went to an appointment shortly after that 24-hour day comment. I accompanied Brad to a doctor's appointment with that same oncologist who, by the way, is a fantastic oncologist who absolutely, by the way, is a fantastic oncologist who absolutely, no question, 100% saved Brad's life from a very rare, very aggressive, very difficult to treat cancer. So I honor him and I am grateful to him. And I also, as a caregiver, had some challenges in communicating and so on that I talk about some in the book from my own personal perspective. But in that appointment I was exhausted. It was actually a hot day, just like the one we're having today.

Kate Washington:

Today outside my air-conditioned office it is 103 degrees and it was like that. It was a June day. I had taken the kids to school or summer camp and wheeled Brad in his heavy hospital-issue wheelchair across this hot asphalt and I was like exhausted and there were bills to pay and laundry to do and all kinds of things and I just kind of broke down in the in the appointments sitting there and I couldn't really talk and I just I had my little notebook out to take notes and ask questions but I was just weeping the whole time, just tears sliding down my face, and the doctor looked at me and he's are you okay? Because if you're not taking care of yourself you can't take care of him. And I kind of thought I guess it doesn't matter if I'm personally okay, it matters if I'm okay enough to take care of the person who's legitimately in crisis Care. So I felt a little bit like oh, like like self-care, when would I have time for that? But I went home and I googled and typed caregiver and was going to look for the support group which you know so many organizations do have, and they're more and more common now, especially online.

Kate Washington:

It wasn't as common then, in 2016, but now, post post-pandemic, that's such a great option for patients and caregivers alike to be able to connect virtually without the challenges of getting to a place.

Kate Washington:

But what the search engine popped up was caregiver burnout.

Kate Washington:

It auto-fills the search. So I clicked on that and it took me to a quiz which I took, and at the end of the quiz, to determine whether I was burned out, it came up with the answer you're already toast like charred piece of bread. And that phrase really stuck with me and I was already writing some. I've been a freelance writer my whole career, so I was already writing about the medical things that our family was going through and so I kind of saved that as the title of my book because to me it spoke to the condition of so many caregivers in the US today who are really tasked with caring for people who need and deserve a bigger network, societal care, a safety net, more than one person who's been pulled into this by a crisis usually a crisis or a long, slow illness and it's not fair to patients or to families to put it all on these individuals is the big argument of my book and that's, I think, why caregivers are in the title of my book, already toast.

G van Londen:

Yeah, I like how you explain that and you beat me to the punch. My first question is always what did you mean with the title? I wanted to say something sort of as a disclaimer before I ask my next question, that is Cancer Bridges was hesitant, as was I all of us were whether we should bring this topic here, because all of you because many of you and me I'm a cancer survivor too feel guilty that we're burdening our partner, and I think that's sort of an elephant in the room and that hopefully, if we discuss it here openly, that maybe we can talk about it and help you embrace the fact that it's the given. All of us at some point need to receive care and all of us at some point need to give care, and it's not your fault, it's. It's not anybody's fault, except that, as kate outlined, there should be more support to help the caregivers and, with that, the patient. Lastly, don't shoot the messenger, and it's easier said than done and it's a learning curve for both parties, but I've learned the hard way that it's easier for the caregiver if we as care recipients cooperate rather than refuse the need for help and want to do it on our own.

G van Londen:

Obviously, there is a balance and a two-way street that requires ongoing communication and negotiation because obviously we want to remain independent as much and as long as we can. But in my practice I used to ask why we call a patient a patient and jokingly I would say because we are supposed to be a bit more patient and leaning in and accepting our hopefully temporary role as a patient. I'm going on a bit of a tangential here. But not accepting or resisting or denying our diagnosis and or treatment plan is something we all go through. It's part of our grieving process. But if you stick in that too long, you might be fighting yourself and spend energy that you could have used better to allow you to heal rather than have that inner turmoil. So if you're stuck In that phase, please talk with others, ask for professional help To allow yourself to Not become your own Worst enemy, if I make sense. But everything takes time and everything in balance.

G van Londen:

She was saying that she almost felt gaslighted that she was told to take better care of yourself so you can take better care of your husband. But kate did not fail. She would do self-care that if she had the time and the bandwidth, but she had so much on her plate to take care of her family, her children, her sick husband, that there was no time for self-care, that there was no time, no reserve for anything. It's sort of a similar thing with physicians who are overworked with everything they have to do, plus a lot of administration and paperwork in the evenings and nights, and they're telling us, if we do better self-care then we will become less burned out from doing all that work. But the point is that we need help.

G van Londen:

The point is that kate needed help. Kate, in this particular case, is not deficient, she's just massively overwhelmed, and it's not a matter of her learning how to cope better, although that's never wrong. But that's not the only piece of the puzzle that we're trying to outline here, and I'm hoping that this disclaimer makes you feel less uncomfortable being here and talking about this topic. This is not to hammer all of you on your head and tell you that you're a burden and you're not managing this right. It's all about telling you that you're doing all you can, but you should get more support from outside. Having said that, kate, feel free to comment on that, but I will also ask you what were your specific symptoms that made you Google? You alluded to it a little bit, but what were your so-called short-term acute symptoms of this burnout syndrome?

Kate Washington:

if I may, yeah, absolutely, when you were speaking about doctors also facing the issue of being told to do more self-care and take more time when what they need is the practical help. The phrase I thought of one that's in the literature a lot these days is compassion fatigue, where people who are in caring professions or in heavy caring roles become exhausted by being continually compassionate. And, honestly, for me I think the top sign of burnout was that my empathy was sapped. I was robotic. I went through my caregiving duties or the things that I needed to do because I had to, but I was exhausted. I was not sleeping well, I was highly anxious and I had a really difficult time getting mental health support for that or help with pills to relieve some anxiety. Honestly, when I asked my physicians and I didn't have time as somebody with full-time work to follow up on that or to really really advocate for myself, because I was really the vast majority of my energy advocating with the medical system, which I'm sure everybody here knows is a full-time job in and of itself. If you need to get something from the medical system or insurance, you could spend 40 hours a week on that a in and of itself. If you need to get something from the medical system or insurance. You could spend 40 hours a week on that.

Kate Washington:

A lot of the time my energy was going to advocating for Brad because he was the more needy partner and I was deaf by orders of magnitude, no question. But I also things that I also noticed. I became physically clumsy. I would trip, I would hurt myself, partly because I was so tired, not sleeping well, you know. I had some physical ailments that I couldn't make time to get seen for or whatever. I was short-tempered, irritable, kind of prone to snapping, just all of the kind of things that I think we all saw a lot of burnout during the pandemic. It's become a really hot topic for people across the board, at work, at home, in a lot of places. But for me, the really scary thing, the thing that made me feel like, oh, I need help, I need more support and I was getting help by the way, brad's parents were with us for a really long time helping. It was just the demands were so high because of the severity of his illness that it was a more than full-time job for many, many people full-time job for many, many people. But it was that loss of empathy and I think some of that looking back, was self-protective.

Kate Washington:

I mentioned that in the throes of Brad's bone marrow transplant he was hospitalized for well over four months and I was more than once told by his physicians that he had a very, very slim chance of survival. There was like a full month when we thought he was going to die. And I've since talked to my older daughter which I tried to hide that from her and she was fully aware, knew that the kids were stressed. It was a really challenging time and I thought we're the kids were stressed. It was a really challenging time and I thought we're going to lose him and I think I walled myself off from that a little bit because I couldn't stop to deal with the emotions, like the depth of the emotions, the emotional crisis that I was going through. There was a lot of grief, there was the loss of the partner, even though he was still alive. He was in the hospital, the kids couldn't see him for months on end, and so I think I really walled off those emotions to a large degree. There was also at least one time when he actually got a terminal diagnosis, which thankfully he was able to get a clinical trial and overcome, overcome, but the extreme challenge of his ordeal, which I know he's talked about really openly with you, was such that I think I kind of emotionally couldn't take it and walled that off.

Kate Washington:

And I think that's something that sometimes caregivers do.

Kate Washington:

I have a contact or a friend, alison Applebaum, who I don't know, if you know her, she runs the caregiver clinic at Memorial Sloan Kettering, which is a clinic where she's a psychologist and she treats caregivers as her patients under the auspices of Memorial Sloan Kettering, like the caregiver is enrolled as a patient, and she also does a lot of research around caregiving and its effects. And she has talked about how the most challenging time or the time of the greatest kind of danger for caregivers, for really severe depression, anxiety and everything, is when caregiving ends or eases up, whether it's because the person has thankfully recovered or sadly there's grief. But a lot of people push those emotions off when there's often secondary trauma from witnessing what a loved one is going through. When people put those things off and they come roaring back. You know emotions don't go away because you're not dealing with them. As I'm sure everybody here knows in one way or another, the trauma associated with extreme illness even more so obviously for the patient is very challenging to process and work through. Thank you, kate.

G van Londen:

I wanted to ask you a question that I've asked you this before, so Kate is ready to answer and is okay with me asking this question. What would you have told yourself if you could go back in time? What would you tell yourself when your journey with Brent this horrifying journey with Brent started that may have helped you in your caregiver journey? Are there some things that you feel comfortable sharing with us?

Kate Washington:

I mean I think ask for help sooner. Yeah, I mean I think ask for help sooner. Ask for help before you are in desperate straits, like as a family, and need it really, like beyond you're past the point of needing it. One of the points of my book, or one of the things I argue, is we live in this really individualistic society where families are kind of expected to handle their business and keep it behind closed doors and there's not a lot of understanding often of the caregiving role and it was really often hard for me to ask for the help I really needed. And now that I have time and the ability to pay it forward, we got a lot of help. I should say it wasn't that we didn't have help and support we absolutely did and support we absolutely did. But you know, I try to pay it forward by offering people help and opening the door to things like running an errand, getting the laundry detergent somebody needs, like some of the things that are not another lasagna for the freezer, as appreciated as those often were. And we had help with a meal train. That was so much at one point that we had to borrow an extra refrigerator from our neighbors because we had so much to keep in the freezer.

Kate Washington:

So we did have all this help and support, but I think, asking for more and also forgiving myself for not being able to do it all and setting some boundaries around what I could do, I mean I did set some boundaries. A lot of those were driven by choices about parenting that sometimes when, say, brad's parents were in town and it was spring break, instead of staying in town and visiting at the hospital which, like my kids couldn't do they couldn't go to the isolation unit I didn't stay in town and visit at the hospital every day. I took them to San Diego and we played on the beach because I realized that they had one childhood and this was it. Sorry, I'm like tearing up thinking about that, but trying to keep that for them and balance all those competing needs of people and realize Brad's parents could fill in for me in terms of providing him companionship and support and advocacy at the hospital. But nobody really fills in for your mom, for little kids. So I often kind of chose that and it was hard and I felt guilty and there's still things that I feel guilty about.

Kate Washington:

But I think self-forgiveness and self-compassion even more than forgiveness in this role is a really important one. I mean, I think there are some things they did that I would just emphasize to myself, say like I stayed with being able to see a therapist for most of the time, which I also recognize was a privilege that's not accessible to a lot of people, but that was a really crucial support that helped me get through it. Yeah, and I think I would also say I'm a planner and I always wanted to have a plan A, b, c and D. And maybe I don't know, I don't know that I would listen to myself if I could have appeared to my past self and said maybe let go of trying to control the future and see what comes and prepare as best you can and then try not to be quite so tightly wound about it. But I think I might have said that might have been useful.

G van Londen:

You know how. There's a saying you should have two lives, one to learn how to live and the second one to redo it a better way. But it's really hard to learn as you practice life. Another thing that Kate and I talked about this preparation for today is it's not easy to be a patient who needs care, and I know that because I'm now dependent and in the beginning I was a really bad patient because I did not really accept the care, and that makes it only harder on the caregiver, and so I guess this is a roundabout way of saying that the patient needs to learn if that is the word to use how to be a patient and accept help, so that it's not a double duty for the caregiver where they have to give care, but also overcome resistance where they have to give care but also overcome resistance.

Kate Washington:

Yeah, I mean, I think obviously there's a big learning curve for both caregiver and patient and you know it's important to recognize that patients are shocked and distressed and at a very difficult and vulnerable moment and hopefully a caregiver and a care recipient can kind of develop a partnership and a way of working together that works. But I think it's also important to recognize we all bring, whoever the caregiver is, whether it's like a parent, the adult child of an aging parent, a spouse, a brother everyone brings the baggage of everything that was in the previous relationship to the care relationship and it's hard to talk about. It's hard to talk about the fact that there's conflict, that sometimes the patient and the caregiver will disagree. Sometimes this happened and I know Brad would acknowledge this, so I'm not speaking out of turn, but when he was really ill he was on a lot of medications and sometimes his judgment about what he needed in line with what the doctors were recommending. They were hard conflicts to have, compassionately and sensitively from my point of view as the caregiver, conflicts to have compassionately and sensitively from my point of view as the caregiver, and it was also, I think it was hard to see the person who was my partner in a very different light and in a different role, and not to have a partner to then turn to and be like what do I do? I really need a hug right now. These things you bring the past relationship but you also lose the past relationship. In some ways it's present but it's also gone, and so I think it's really important for everyone in the relationship and in the family system where there's care needs and illness and trauma, to recognize that it is traumatic, that it is a time that needs a lot of compassion from everybody. I tried to have that. I failed sometimes. We failed sometimes at being kind to each other and it's a hard situation.

Kate Washington:

And I think one of the things I also wanted to write about in my book is and sometimes there's, there's stuff in there that's pretty raw and that was a little bit hard for me to put out in the world, and Brad read every word of it a couple of times and he's also a writer and he was like you have to tell the truth. It's no good if you don't tell your truth. So I really appreciated like that support from him in things that were often pretty difficult and I know he had a really difficult time and wrote honestly about that himself. I think a lot of stories of caregiving are really sugar-coated. There's a lot of the joys and, yes, there are rewards, and when you can find One of the things that actually that Alison Applebaum talks about that I wish I'd known about, like finding meaning in the caregiving role, finding meaning in what you're doing and in that connection, and having that meaning and sense of purpose can really help with all the challenges of the role. That was not something that I was really in touch with at the time, but I think that, as well as finding meaning, we have to acknowledge that sometimes there are just really hard things. Well as finding meaning, we have to acknowledge that sometimes there are just really hard things.

Kate Washington:

People are sent home from the hospital needing kinds of medical care that a generation or two ago only a nurse would have done. It was terrifying to me to be told you're going to, you're going to flush his line. I know that's like a basic nursing task, but I am not a nurse. I didn't know what I was doing. My hands were trembling. I got a 20 minute training and I was like I could kill this man right here in our guest room where he's lying down because I don't know what I'm doing. So it's a multi.

G van Londen:

It's just so multi-layered, I remember how you wrote in your book about how the doctor said oh, you're just going to shove his tooth feeding and that will be it. Very, plug it in.

Kate Washington:

Yeah, but he thought he could do it and at the time he was like had neuropathy and was blind.

G van Londen:

It was like this is like a 20 minute procedure at best and it's it's a whole, whole ordeal that obviously providers who have never been through this before don't really understand the complexity of the whole ceremony. Almost it's sort of like a procedure. I see we have a question from the audience in terms of how to best advocate to improve support for caregivers at local, state or national level.

Kate Washington:

Yeah, I mean there are some advocacy organizations emerging around this issue. One is called Caring Across Generations. There's Family Caregiver Alliance and various caregiving advocacy organizations and I'm not familiar with the ones on the state level, but there are ones within different states working for different kinds of state laws, because I think a lot of the care movement has coalesced around this idea. We need to have paid caregiving leave. We have 12 weeks of FMLA leave unpaid for people, 12 weeks of FMLA leave unpaid for people. So it's a real financial burden to take time to care for your loved ones. So I think that's one place that advocacy organizations are working to get better state-level laws. I'm fortunate in California we do have some more support, but there are only a few states that have that kind of leave policy.

Kate Washington:

I mean I think that, yes, like calling representatives and senators and just making people aware of this issue is well, and some of the big disease advocacy and elder advocacy organizations, because there is this kind of elder care like cliff coming as the baby boomers age. The oldest of the baby boomers are in their 70s and that's a real big generation that's going to need a lot of care as it ages. So people are seeing that numbers of the younger generations are not going to be available to meet the need, and we already have 53 million that's the 2020 statistic caregivers for adults in the US. That's a huge proportion of the population, but it's also part of the population that, as I'm sure you know only too well, doesn't have a lot of time to go to congressional hearings and fight for itself, and we're in a challenging political climate to get change made.

Kate Washington:

And there was a movement toward care as like a political change around care at the federal level after the 2020 election and in the wake of the pandemic that didn't pass. And I'm actually in an organization that's it's like a kind of loose group, but it's had some networking. That kind of bring together a lot of the people working for care policy at on all levels and all different kinds of care. There's a lot of folks in there who are working more around the child care and parenting space, but I think caregiving for the ill and for the elderly is still a little bit of an invisible issue. So I think raising one's voice, talking more if you can spare the time for letters to the editor or calling your congressman, those are important, good places to start, but there are also these advocacy organizations to look toward.

G van Londen:

Thank you, kate. We will put some links in the podcast with some websites that you can go to to use your voice to make noise, because only squeaky wheels get oil, as they say. Thank you for bringing up your situation and allowing it to further discussion. We have another 10 minutes and I wanted to go to Kate's situation now, which is a few years after this very intense ordeal. You've all heard that Brett is doing at the moment reasonably well and we're hoping that it stays that way, but I wanted to ask the same for Kate Long-term lingering symptoms related to caregiver burnouts for you, if you're comfortable discussing that, for your marriage and your children, because they were in their formative years when all of this happened, and so, if you're comfortable, yeah, absolutely, Thank you.

Kate Washington:

Thank you for asking the question in such a kind and sensitive way. Yeah, so my book came out. I'll just give like the brief timeline. Brad's diagnosis was in 2015. The book came out in or his bone marrow transplant was in 2016. And then there were many other bumps along the way that were complicated and the book came out in 2021.

Kate Washington:

So it was a gap between those things, but also, in a funny way, he had been steadily getting better and then the pandemic put us right back into a real caregiver-caregivee relationship because he has ongoing issues with being immune compromised. So that was kind of a strange new reprise of those roles which we were not yet out of and we separated amicably in 2022, about a year after the book came out. So the book kind of ends on this note of things are, we're still together but we weren't sure quite what would happen and I will say it was. It was just very hard on the relationship as a marriage that he was so ill. We both, I think, would agree that we had a lot of different kinds of trauma around it and dealt with them in some ways differently and ultimately realized that we were better as friends and as co-parents. I think we're very successful co-parents and I'm really proud of our kids-parents and I'm really proud of our kids and I think they are doing really well. Of course, they have challenges. It was very traumatic to see how sick their dad was and it disrupted their childhood a lot, but they got a lot of support. I made sure that they had therapists of their own all the way through. They had therapists of their own all the way through. In fact, they each still have longstanding relationships with the counselors that they saw.

Kate Washington:

They were able to attend summer camp every year through this amazing organization called Camp Kesem and if you don't, it's K-E-S-E-M and for anyone who doesn't know about it, it's a free summer camp to support kids affected by a parent's cancer and there are chapters of it all around the country. They're run by college student volunteers. My older daughter is a college student and part of her choice in where she was going to go to school was that she only wanted to go to places that had a chapter of Camp Kesem that she could volunteer for as a counselor. So she's going to be a counselor this summer and it'll be the first year that my younger one goes to camp without her sister, but she's going to her own chapter. It's two different universities. They go to the University of California at Davis chapter. My older daughter is at UC Berkeley and so she's volunteering through them, but they're going one week after another. So that was a huge support for them and is really meaningful, I think, to them. But I feel like they are really thriving and that is just like the biggest joy that I can imagine. I'm so glad that they're okay Because this, as we all know, this generation also had a lot to contend with with the pandemic and a lot of other, a lot of other things I mean for myself I'm now doing really well.

Kate Washington:

I went through a long period where I was kind of creatively drained after this book came out, Also to do with like promotion and talking about the some of the traumatic things in it over and over and feeling really tapped out and and the challenges of Of you know we're working out the end of our marriage were a lot.

Kate Washington:

I also write about this to some degree in the book. I had some prior grief where my mother had died very suddenly. She was bipolar. She died suddenly by suicide when my children were very, very young and because they were so young, I didn't have a lot of time to process and grieve. So I ended up doing, over the last year and a bit, some fairly intensive therapy to work through some of that old grief and the challenges and grief that I have associated with Brad's illness and with the changes in our relationship. But I'm now. I'm working on a new book, I'm working a lot on a bunch of different writing projects and doing just like traveling. The girls and I are going to go to Europe soon and we're busy and thriving. So that's kind of the the long answer.

G van Londen:

Thank you. Thank you, kate. Marriage or relationships are difficult to maintain in best of circumstances, and certain factors can strengthen the relationship and certain factors can drive two people apart, and it's not easy to decide when you've reached that point that maybe it's time to split, and so I really compliment you on sharing your journey. Everybody makes their own decisions. Everybody makes their own journey, and you never really know if it was the right choice. I think sometimes it's hard to know. We usually like to start on time and end on time, so we have a few minutes, two minutes, left.

G van Londen:

I will say one more thing that I should have said earlier. When couples survive or split is a decision that only that couple can make after communication, hopefully an informed conversation. For outsiders it's easy to pass judgment, but I think many of you here know that you really never know what's happening in someone's relationship, and so it's really hard to pass judgment. And so if you're the one that's being passed judgment on, just remember who you are and why you made a decision to stick together or not. Only you know why you did that. I hope that today tonight you found helpful. I think the big theme is the soul. I think the big theme is the soul the soul in our society and the soul in medicine. We need to nurture that because we need it back, and I'm hoping that you found this helpful, kate, would you?

Kate Washington:

like to say something at the closing. Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you all for being here, for listening and for your lovely questions. I want to echo, I think, the idea of soul and the idea of care. Care is such a broader concept than the specifics of any one kind of caregiving right, and we all need and deserve care the caregivers, the ill, the children, everything. It's what knits our society and our culture together and it's so often so undervalued. I make a whole argument in my book about like why that is because of gender politics and all kinds of things, but and so I won't go into those weeds here. But I think the key is to remember care is a human trait that we all kind of owe to each other and whatever we can do to support each other and make that easier on a societal level, I argue we don't need more self-care, we need community care, and I think I'll just end on that note. Thank you, kate.

People on this episode

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Josie

Host
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Brad Buchanan

Co-host
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Cancer Bridges

Guest
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Kate Washington

Guest