A Minute For Caregivers

I'm Peter Rosenberger and for more than 37 years I've been a caregiver for my wife who has a massive medical journey that has included 85 operations that I can count, 100 doctors plus, I stopped counting at 100, 13 different hospitals and this has been going on since she was hurt in a car accident in 1983, a couple years before I met her. What do you say to a caregiver? How do you help a caregiver? Why should you help a caregiver?

What does all that look like? People come up to me over the years and say, well, make sure you take care of yourself. And I'm like, thank you, Captain Obvious. You know, 37 years you learn a few things and I've taken those things.

All of them learned the hard way. I don't think I've ever learned anything the easy way. And I've written a new book and I'm really proud of this book. It's called A Minute for Caregivers When Every Day Feels Like Monday. And I remember calling up to a doctor's office one time and I used to do this on my radio program and I'll say to every caller, how are you feeling? And I just kind of got in the habit of doing that.

And I was talking to this billing agent at the doctor's office and said, how are you feeling? And she said, oh, great, it's Friday. And before I could catch myself, I said, Friday means nothing to me. Every day is Monday. And I felt kind of ashamed of that. I'm sorry for that. But I realized that whole principle of every day is Monday.

What that means for us as caregivers, we know that this is going to be a challenging day. And I wrote these one minute chapters. You literally could read them in one minute.

I timed them. And it's filled with bedrock principles that we as caregivers can lean on that we can depend upon to get us to safety where we can catch our breath, take a knee if we have to, and reorient our thinking and the weight that we carry on our shoulders. If you don't know what to say to a caregiver, don't worry about it.

I do. Give them this book. If you're a pastor, if you're a counselor and you've got somebody in your church or in your practice that's coming in and they're struggling, they've got an aging parent. They've got a special needs child. They've got an alcoholic or an addict in their life. They've got somebody with trauma, some type of disease, mental illness.

It doesn't matter the affliction. There's always a caregiver. And if you don't know what to say, don't worry about it.

I do. Give them this. It says it in a way, I speak fluent caregiver, and it says it in a way they're going to understand it. It's called a minute for caregivers.

Every day feels like Monday. Get a copy of it today. Send it to somebody you know who's struggling. Don't let somebody care give alone. Isolation is one of the most crippling things that a family caregiver endures. Let's fix that. Let them hear it in a way they can understand. A minute for caregivers when every day feels like Monday.