The phone’s blue light paints a ghost on the ceiling. It’s that specific shade of dead-of-night blue that feels like an accusation. Your thumb has a life of its own, scrolling through forums, medical journals, survival statistics that are somehow both too optimistic and not optimistic enough. Your heart is doing that thing again, that trip-hammer rhythm against your ribs, a frantic Morse code signaling an emergency that is happening to someone else’s body, but inside of yours. You’re not the patient. You’re just the one who’s awake.

We talk about caregiving as a role, a noble verb. We don’t talk about it as a medical condition in itself, a chronic exposure to trauma that rewires your nervous system. The illness is singular, but the trauma is plural. It radiates. It infects the entire support structure, leaving a wake of people running on fumes, their own health silently eroding while they focus on a more socially acceptable, more visible decline.

I’ve been trying to write this sentence for what feels like an hour. The cursor blinks, blinks, blinks. It’s the same cognitive short-circuit you feel when someone asks, “How are you?” and your brain stalls, trying to calculate the socially appropriate answer versus the dizzyingly complex truth.

Drew J.: The Physics of Pressure

Drew J. inspects chimneys for a living. He’s a man who understands structural integrity, the physics of pressure, and the slow, corrosive damage of unseen things. His hands are calloused and precise. He can tell you the R-value of 42 different types of insulation. He’s logical. Until his dad got sick. Now, his precision is gone. He lives in a haze of appointments, medication schedules, and the relentless, low-grade hum of anticipatory grief. He told me he once stared at his father’s pill organizer for a full two minutes, completely unable to remember if it was Tuesday morning or Wednesday night. He got it wrong. The panic that followed, he said, was worse than finding a Stage 2 creosote buildup in a flue.

Everyone gives you advice, of course. “You have to take care of yourself,” they say, as if it’s a simple item you can check off a to-do list, like buying milk. They don’t understand that “self-care” feels like a betrayal when someone you love is suffering. Every moment you spend on yourself is a moment you’re not spending on research, on coordinating with doctors, on just *being there*. So you don’t. You cancel your own dental appointments. You stop going to the gym. You eat standing over the sink. And you tell everyone you’re fine, because it’s easier than explaining the unexplainable exhaustion that has settled deep in your bones.

I used to believe that the only way to manage the chaos was with brutal, meticulous organization. Spreadsheets for symptoms. Alarms for medications. A binder with tabs for test results, insurance claims, and contact numbers for 22 different specialists. You have to become the CEO of a company you never wanted to own, a company whose only product is someone else’s survival.