The doctors were good. I want to say that. They were attentive and they explained things clearly and they called me back. The neurologist, Dr. Ramesh, once told me, near the end of a long appointment, that I was “exceptionally well-organized for a family caregiver.” I said thank you. I went home and put the date and that comment in the folder, partly because I was starting to document everything and partly because it was the closest thing to a performance review I’d had in years.
I was working about fifteen hours a week at this point. The agency I contracted through had a client who needed bookkeeping for a small retail chain, and the work was steady and I was good at it and they were flexible enough that I could move things around when I needed to. It kept me from going completely under financially, but only barely. My savings were in steady decline, offset by not having rent but offset back by the things I paid for out of pocket.
Here is where I want to be precise, because later precision was going to matter.
I did not pay for everything in that house. My mother had her Social Security and a small pension from the county where she’d worked as a clerk for twenty-two years. She paid for her own prescriptions and her doctors and her phone and most of the utilities and groceries. She was not destitute. She managed her own finances for most of this period, with me looking over her shoulder, and she managed them capably.