Now They Need You

Now They Need You: The Book for Caregivers A Handbook for Anyone Looking After Someone

Nobody hands you the job. There is no meeting, no training, no moment when someone explains what is about to be asked of you. You simply do the next necessary thing, and then the one after that, and one day you realise you are the person who takes care of someone.

This book is not about them. There are shelves of those. This one is about you: what your days are going to feel like, what it will cost, which parts of it can be changed and how, and how to remain a whole person while doing it. That is not selfishness. You may have siblings, a partner, nurses, a whole team around you, and you will still be the one holding it together day to day. Looking after yourself is part of the job, not time off from it.

Written for every kind of caregiver, the daughter who flew home, the husband who learned to change a dressing, the mother sleeping in a chair, the friend who turned out to be the only one, it follows the real shape of the thing: the call, learning the job, the long middle, the decline, and then the fork, because some of these stories end in a recovery and some end in a death, and both endings have their own work.

Inside:

• The first seventy-two hours, in order, and the two decisions not to make in week one
• How to be believed by clinicians, the six questions that get real answers, and a photocopiable page for every appointment
• Hands-on care done safely: transfers, bathing, toileting, and the back injuries that end caregiving careers
• The handover page: one sheet that lets someone else take over the day you cannot
• Hospitals, from the first four hours in the emergency department to the four things that reliably go wrong on a ward
• Anger, resentment, guilt, and the thought you are ashamed of, said out loud
• Sleep, money, work, and a care plan for the caregiver
• Caring while raising children: what to tell them at every age, and the capable teenager who becomes the second carer without anyone deciding it
• Getting siblings to do something, with the scripts and the family-meeting agenda
• Dementia: what to do instead of correcting, and the sudden change that means call today
• Taking the keys, moving them in, and the facility question without shame
• Palliative care, hospice, the vigil, and the four sentences worth saying before it is too late
• Recovery, rehab, the plateau, and how to hand the job back on purpose
• After a death: the paperwork nobody warns you about, in the order it arrives
• Twenty-four worksheets, checklists and word-for-word scripts, plus a lookup section for the days when reading is beyond you
• Every chapter ends with a page written to you rather than about them.

Honest about the parts nobody says. Practical about the parts you can change. Built to be useful immediately, because your time just got precious.

The only promise this book makes: whatever this asks of you, you will not have to work it out alone.