Quiet No More

Finding Strength in the Midst of Family Challenges

September 08, 2024 • Carmen Cauthen

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What happens when life throws one challenge after another, each more daunting than the last?

Carmen Coffin shares her heart-wrenching journey of receiving a life-altering phone call at 2:45 AM and the subsequent emotional rollercoaster. Hear her courageous recounting of grieving the loss of a stepson while supporting a shattered spouse, all amidst the chaos of organizing her daughter's scoliosis surgery and addressing another child's mental health concerns. 

Carmen's story is one of immense strength, as she navigates these crises with a steadfast resolve to protect her family, often at the expense of her own emotional well-being.

Balancing caregiving responsibilities for both children and aging parents is no small feat, especially when resources are stretched thin. Carmen opens up about the physical and emotional toll of this double duty, sharing personal anecdotes that highlight the exhaustion and resilience required. From managing a parent's dementia to ensuring her children's needs are met, 

Carmen reveals the importance of a support network and practical strategies to maintain some semblance of normalcy. This episode is a raw and insightful look into the life of a caregiver, shedding light on both the hidden struggles and the small triumphs along the way.

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Carmen Wimberley Cauthen is an author, speaker, and lover of history, Black history in particular. As a truth teller, she delights in finding the hidden truths about the lives of people who made a difference - whether they were unknown icons or regular everyday people.

To Learn more of Carmen:
www.carmencauthen.com
www.researchandresource.com

Speaker 1:

Unseen, unheard. We've lived like that far too long. I'm Carmen Coffin and this is Quiet, no More Girl. You know that was hard. It's not just that being married is. I mean, maybe we go into expecting it to be easy. We don't think about life. Life is not an easy thing and marriage, if you're married, that's part of your life and so it's not easy. What do you do when the hard times come? What are the hard times? You know, some days hard times is just I don't feel like it. That's an easy hard time. What do you do when the real hard times come? Hard time what do you do when the real hard times come?

Speaker 1:

What do you do when you get a phone call at 2.45 in the morning and you answer it and it's your spouse's child spouse's former person, and they say I need to speak to him? Well, you know, first of all you've got to call at 245 in the morning, so something is wrong. And then you see his face crumble and you find out, or you hear him say not my boy, and you know something's wrong. You don't know what it is, but you know something's wrong and somewhere inside you that means your stomach knots up and you know you got to put on the strong because you can see that something is wrong. And then he gets off the phone and he says my baby's dead, I gotta go. What do you mean? Your baby's dead? Your baby's not 21 yet. And he gets dressed and you say let me pray. And then he goes, and then you can't go back to sleep and you can't tell your other children because that's their brother and you have to wait till you get news. It's not that he doesn't have a cell phone, it's just, it's a. It's a whole processing time for everybody. What do you do? How do you cope? Which hat do you put on?

Speaker 1:

For me, I was always the caregiver, so that's part of that hat. And he came home and he was crushed when we met. His son was 18 months old. He was precious and we loved him. He was my child too. I didn't birth him, but he was my child and there was so much going on in that one particular season of our lives.

Speaker 1:

Literally a week and a half prior, I had taken our youngest daughter to the psychologist to be tested Because the school thought that there was something wrong with her and I didn't trust the school system to test her. So I went to the doctor and I said you find us someone to test her. And she cried all during the testing, the first day of the testing, and the psychologist said we've never had this to happen before and they couldn't finish. So we waited. And while we were waiting we got this phone call and then that meant we had to plan a funeral. Except he wasn't my child. So I couldn't help plan the funeral. All I could do was be a support, couldn't help plan the funeral. All I could do was be a support. In fact I didn't even feel like I could grieve because he wasn't my child. He had been my child all those times he came and stayed with us, all those times we went on vacations and he would head off to family visits with my side of the family. He was my child, but he wasn't my child. He was my children's brother, but he wasn't my child.

Speaker 1:

And during that same week, when my husband was off helping to plan the funeral and pick out a coffin, I had to take my other child, my oldest child, to a hospital in another city because she had scoliosis. And when we went to that appointment that doctor said this was September. She had to have surgery. Her spinal curve was 55% and it couldn't wait until the end of the school year. Curve was 55% and it couldn't wait until the end of the school year. So now I'm planning a surgery for the same period of time and I couldn't tell my spouse because he could not cope with one more thing and so I held it.

Speaker 1:

I was quiet and I couldn't tell anybody else because I didn't want anybody else to accidentally say something to him and I hadn't told him. So I was the support for myself. That's a hard time. I felt like they were trying to tell me for myself. That's a hard time. I felt like they were trying to tell me that my youngest daughter was mentally retarded and I knew she wasn't, but they were the doctors and I wasn't, and so I had to push the rest of her testing off. It's hard. It's hard to grieve a child when it's your own child. It's even harder when it's your child and it's not your child.

Speaker 1:

There were other hard times. My husband was sick a lot and he's not the kind of man who likes to go to the emergency room when he needs to go, but you know that once he's sick that's where you're going to end up. And that was hard, running back and forth to the emergency room three or four times a year and having young children and not going until the middle of the night. And then you have to have a support team because you have to be able to call somebody in the middle of the night and go. Can I bring the girls and just drop them off on the way to the ER? That's craziness, but that was what we lived with. That was what I lived with.

Speaker 1:

And then there were things like getting a phone call during the middle of the day from a child at school or from an administrator at school who says your daughter tripped on the steps and we aren't sure if she broke her ankle or what. But can you come and get her? And they have to wheel her out of the high school in a chair and you put her in the car and then you race to the emergency room in a chair and you put her in the car and then you race to the emergency room only to find out that, yes, she did break one ankle. And then you know they wrap it and they do all the tests and stuff and they send you to the orthopedist and then you find out it wasn't just one ankle, it was two ankles. That's hard, it's a hard time and you already know your husband doesn't handle sickness, he doesn't handle any of that and you don't even want to tell him those things.

Speaker 1:

And after the surgery for the child who had the scoliosis, who's also the one who broke the ankles, she is in the hospital and at at that point I was on oxygen. So I knew if we went to a hospital for anything, I needed to have a tank and I needed to have extra cording and tubing and fortunately the hospital would let me hook into the oxygen at the room where they were, where we were. But she had to have surgery and when you don't leave a child in the hospital by themselves, you don't know what's going to happen or what's going to be needed. So some adult needs to be there. And when her dad came, he's frustrated and he came in the room and she has small veins and a vein rolled while her IV came out. And so as he's coming in he who does not like blood he sees a nurse putting another needle in her vein. He passes out in her hospital room and they don't know why and I sort of can figure it out, but I'm not a certified professional and so suddenly the room fills up with medical professionals. They're calling codes because they don't know what's going on, and then I have to find somebody from another town, from home because we're out of town to come and stay with her while I go with him to the ER.

Speaker 1:

Things can be hard at home home. After three and a half years after that surgery for the daughter who had scoliosis she complained about. She kept complaining about pain in her back, pain in her back, and she'd had these rods put in and literally grew four inches after the rods were put in. When she came out of surgery After three and a half years, we find out that she has an infection, has been a staph infection that's been growing in her back ever since she had the surgery. This was before they learned to do a thorough antibacterial washing after they do scoliosis surgery, and the only reason we found out was because the infection grew and hit a space in her back that had extra tissue in it and started coming out. So then we had to rush to the hospital again, have another surgery to clean the infection out and then, when they closed her up after three days, run back to the other town where the other hospital was and have the rods removed.

Speaker 1:

Those things are hard on a marriage. I can imagine having a child who has a serious illness or childhood cancer, or your spouse or yourself being sick with any kind of disease is difficult. It's hard because sometimes the caregiving takes away from the being married. And so how do you handle that? How do you handle when everybody's got a health issue in the family? How do you handle financial issues? Because when you've got health issues, unless you're making tons of money, that's going to affect your financial life as well. Money gets tight If you're too proud. How do you handle needing to set up a GoFundMe to help pay for medical expenses If you don't have health insurance or health insurance that'll cover all the bills? How do you deal with that? Do you all talk about it together? We didn't. It was never a conversation. If I tried to have the conversation, it didn't go well or I would hear let's talk about it later, and later would never come. So the bills would pile up and I still had to work because the health insurance came through my job. Remember, my husband was self-employed at this point, so anything that happened it was me. I was responsible for it.

Speaker 1:

At one point we went into foreclosure. That's not something you want to talk about with your friends and family, and you don't want to talk about it. But you also are worried about what happens if I can't get out of it. What happens if I can't figure it out? Where's my family going to go? What roof do we have over our heads? It's a scary place to be. So when I talk to people about affordable housing, I completely understand what that looks like. We were fortunate we found a law school clinic that had a foreclosure program and we were able to use them to help us get out of foreclosure. But it didn't mean that the financial issues went away. It just meant we got out of that one. What happens when we have to do caregiving? Who does the bulk of the work? Does somebody have to stay home from the job that they had in order to do it? Do you share those responsibilities?

Speaker 1:

After my daughter that had the surgeries came home, she was home for six weeks after that second surgery and we had to have a nurse to come in to check her two or three times a week and the medication that she had to use to keep from getting another infection was delivered to our front door. It had to be refrigerated and it took up both of the crisper bins. In the bottom of the refrigerator there were big three inch balls of medicine that had to be infused three times a day. She had a PICC line, so that was a tube inserted close to her heart at first until that got infected and that was another run to the emergency room. But I had to learn how to put all of that into her when the nurse wasn't there and her father doesn't like medicine or needles or any of that stuff, so it was all on me.

Speaker 1:

There's not always support that you need and the caregiver gets tired. The caregiver gets very tired and the caregiver can't always get a spot to rest. I was able to take off work for a while and I was fortunate that I had some friends who would come in and sit with her while I would go back to work some. But how do you handle that? What are the conversations like? Do you have the conversations, or are you so tired you just fall in bed. You hope somebody's cooking dinner or maybe somebody's bringing it, or maybe you can afford to go get something to eat and bring it back home. And then for the other child, you're trying to keep it as normal as possible. It's hard and you hope that your spouse is willing or able to assist you.

Speaker 1:

And then taking care of parents as well parents as well. I did all of that. My parents didn't want to move in with us and there wasn't room for them too. We had a small house, but there was a point where we had to take care of them. There was a point because my father had dementia and my mother had been taking care of him and she got sick. She ended up on oxygen, she started to lose her sight. So a lot of times I would go to their house. I would cook dinner at my house, take it to their house, have my husband bring the children to our house, to their house, and we would eat together and I would make sure that they had food. Or my dad would call me in the middle of the night and say something's wrong with your mother, can you come help? I don't know what to do. And I would get to their house at midnight. I had a key I would get to their house at midnight, usually on Sunday nights, and fix their medicine for the next week, both of them. I learned to count pills. I'm fortunate my dad was a pharmacist, so pills were not an anathema to me. But how do you handle that? What do you do? Does it? Do you take the extra steps that is required to strengthen your marriage while you're doing that, or do you just keep going down the same road and you're still not talking. You're still not handling things. It begins to break the bonds. It begins to break the respect that you have for the other person. It begins to piss you off. And what do you do when you're pissed off? Do you say something or do you let it go? Do you say something, to the point where you're raising your voice and screaming and yelling? Do you drive your blood pressure up? Do you go to the hairdresser and go girl, I'm sick of this. Do you decide to take on other chores, to get out of the house? A lot of caregivers? Do they find other folks that can come in and help and they go back to work because that's their escape? That's the one place where they don't have to think about the responsibilities of taking care of everybody else. Even though it's in the back of your mind and you got to do it. It's hard and it's tiring and if you don't have any support it pisses you off and eventually you'll say something or you probably were saying something all along, but if nobody was paying any attention, you just get angrier and angrier and you get quieter and quieter and you get cold and you start to not care, unless somebody says what are you going to do about it? And then you're quiet no more. You've been listening to Quiet no More, where I share my journey, so you can be quiet no more. Let's connect at wwwcarmencawthoncom.