One of the first things that we were taught to ask gentlemen who came into the emergency room was whether they've had the honor of serving their country. The VA started geriatrics in this country in the '70s, and there are lots of resources for people who served, men and women now, and their families. So it's really important to hook up with the VA and find out what is available for them. Now, it's a bureaucracy, and there's lots of red tape, but there are care managers available in the community who know the VA, and the National Association of Professional Geriatrics Care Managers is a national organization of mostly social workers, but sometimes nurses, who know everything in your area.

And you go on their website, you put in the zip code where you need the care, and it will spit out every certified elder care consultant in whatever radius you choose, ten miles, fifteen miles, twenty miles. There is a certification required to be on the site, so if somebody is on the site, you can know that they have the education and the training and have passed the exam, so they know how to do this. You have to look at levels of experience, people who are cultural issues. You know, you have to interview them to find out the people that work for you, but this is the best money a family can spend.

The Area Agencies on Aging do this for a sliding scale based on your senior's income, and the elder care consultants from caremanager.org are private pay. It can be fifty dollars an hour to two hundred and fifty dollars an hour, depending on what part of the country you live in.

But remember, you don't need them eight hours a day. You may only need two or three hours to set up the plan and then come back and check on it every so often. I have had families chip in to do this because it is the best money you can spend to find out exactly what your older person needs and how to get it quickly. The main takeaway from To Survive Caregiving is that you are the quarterback and not the line staff. You have to make it happen. You don't have to do everything yourself, and that you can't do everything yourself. You endanger yourself and the person that you love if you don't take care of their caregiver.

The takeaway from The Doctor Is In comes from a chapter that I call "The Care Warriors," and I brought together my dyed-in-the-wool caregivers, people I knew were experienced, and I fed them. We had a focus group, and I showed the chapters, did the outlines with them, and they had so much wisdom that I gave them a chapter of their own. And this bracelet that I wear is "I am a care warrior" because these people knew what they were doing, and that's the last chapter of the book, and it reiterates that, but in more specific ways. You have to take care of yourself. You have to let go of your guilt.

You have to realize that you are human. Nobody's going to do this purposely. And you also have to be flexible, because what worked today ain't going to work tomorrow. You have to be ready to change and adapt and to garner your resources, and that's what they wanted everybody to know.