Sixteen years ago this week on a rainy Fourth of July weekend, I drove a rental truck to a local magazine printer's warehouse to pick up copies of the first issue of Today's Caregiver magazine. I loaded the issues onto the truck and spent the entire next week delivering the magazines to hospitals and care facilities across my community.

Four months later, we created caregiver.com and our first national subscriptions started flowing in through the new medium, the Internet. Yet, it is this first weekend that will always be indelibly etched in my mind. As I shared the magazines with caregivers in waiting rooms across the region and watched them flip through the pages, it was tremendously gratifying to see the recognition pass across their faces that maybe they weren't so alone after all.

One of my favorite moments happened as I sat down in the main waiting room of a Fort Lauderdale hospital and watched with great interest as two elderly sisters picked up a copy of the magazine which I had just placed on the table. As they looked through the publication, one lady suddenly brightened up, pointed to an article on diabetic foot care and said: "See, Margaret, I told you that you shouldn't go barefoot." She then proceeded to go tip by tip through the entire article using it to support her contentions about her sister's diabetes care. She was using the article to help her as she cared for her sister.

Countless other such moments have occurred throughout the past 109 Fearless Caregiver Conferences and as I speak with family caregivers on airplanes, at other events, in hospital waiting rooms and even through emails. I have been blessed by these conversations and the opportunity to share them here with you in this newsletter, on caregiver.com, at the events and in the pages of Today's Caregiver magazine. I look forward to spending the rest of my days doing what I love most: talking to, sharing with, and learning from the real healthcare experts in the world - family caregivers. 

I can tell you without hesitation that all the work we do here we take very personally, whether we are talking about issues that have affected our own families or not.  Though sometimes, it becomes extremely personal.  I invite you to spend time in our new caregiver.com CMT channel.  I am grateful to the good works of our partners at The Hereditary Neuropathy Foundation and can only hope that our work together will make it easier for folks like my parents when they frantically searched for information and advice upon my own diagnosis as a teenager.

Sweet sixteen?  As another South Florida resident once said, “How sweet it is!” (For you young’uns, that was Jackie Gleason.)

Have a safe, relaxing and happy holiday.

 

Gary Barg
Editor-in-Chief
gary@caregiver.com