Careless Caregivers

Careless Caregivers is not a planner or guide to eldercare nor is it a diary or journal relating an eldercare odyssey. Rather, it is a short collection of true stories about one family’s eldercare experience with hired in-home caregivers. Told in a blunt and humorous fashion, the book has a simple objective—to rally aging parents and their children to mentally and financially prepare for an unavoidable future. Readers will find stories that are simultaneously ridiculous, touching, appalling and entertaining, a combination that represents the reality of caring for parents who are aging-in-place. Rosanna Fay shares just a handful of her family’s personal experiences with paid in-home caregivers to make a powerful point; the problem of eldercare options is far worse than most people imagine and denial is every family’s biggest enemy.

Careless Caregivers is not a planner or guide to eldercare nor is it a diary or journal relating an eldercare odyssey. Rather, it is a short collection of true stories about one family’s eldercare experience with hired in-home caregivers. Told in a blunt and humorous fashion, the book has a simple objective—to rally aging parents and their children to mentally and financially prepare for an unavoidable future. Readers will find stories that are simultaneously ridiculous, touching, appalling and entertaining, a combination that represents the reality of caring for parents who are aging-in-place. Rosanna Fay shares just a handful of her family’s personal experiences with paid in-home caregivers to make a powerful point; the problem of eldercare options is far worse than most people imagine and denial is every family’s biggest enemy. With her parents suddenly and unexpectedly admitted in two different hospitals located twenty miles apart, and her siblings and herself living out of state, Rosanna’s family had to quickly come up with a caregiving solution. After visiting area nursing homes and assisted living facilities, they found that none of them were suitable for a family pet, let alone their parents. What became certain, as expressed by the entire family, was that placing their parents in a nursing home was not an option. Rosanna’s parents were insistent that they could find a way to remain in their own home, despite the distance from their children or any relatives who could provide regular assistance. So, with her parents’ mandate, she found a live-in caregiver service to provide them with 24/7 support. To avoid overwhelming readers, Rosanna has chosen just a handful of true stories about the professional caregivers hired by her family—stories that represent either the most defining moments of their experience or the most ridiculously unbelievable levels of poor care that her parents endured. In short, she shares the moments that her family categorized as ‘so bad, we had to laugh’ because if they hadn’t found the humor in the situation they would have completely unraveled.

Rosanna Fay is an eldercare enthusiast who has been professionally writing for the past 25 years as part of her career in technology marketing. Feeling coddled and let down by other eldercare books in the market, she decided a different type of voice was needed in order to continue exposing the massive problem of eldercare in the U.S. With the belief that nothing is more powerful than the truth, Rosanna decided to share the most troubling stories of her family’s first hand experience with paid elder caregivers. Unlike the publications that she found to be dry, depressing or professorial in tone, she wanted her writing to be humorous and blunt with the hope of gaining the readership needed to better publicize the problem. Since the passing of her parents, Rosanna has integrated her extensive experience in mobile technology with her passion for eldercare. This past year she retired from the mobile strategy company she had co-founded and managed since 2001, and founded The Healing Hummingbird where she consults on aging in place technologies. Rosanna is specifically focused on home automation and mobile solutions that can improve the quality of in-home care services provided by family member caregivers. She will be launching an aging in place blog with the release of her first eBook. Rosanna was a double major in English and Communications at Boston College where she graduated cum laude in 1988. She resides with her husband in the Silicon Valley area of California.