The Wicked Daughter - Managing Your Aging Parents, One Meltdown at a Time

Somewhere between hospital stays, rehab schedules, medical appointments, and trying to figure out what happens next, I realized something: Caregiving has a funny way of making your own life disappear. Mom had been through weeks of hospitals and rehab, and somewhere along the way, we'd lost a lot of the things that made her feel like herself. Then rehab reminded me that they had a hair and nai...

Well... this week's episode is a day late. Which, considering what this episode is about, is actually pretty damn appropriate. Because caregiving has a funny way of making you feel like you've stepped out of your own life. For weeks, everything revolved around Mom — the hospital, rehab, doctors, decisions, phone calls, paperwork, and whatever crisis was waiting around the next corner. Me...

Getting an aging parent to a doctor’s appointment is easy… until it isn’t. In this episode of The Wicked Daughter , Mom is settling into rehab and starting to make real progress. She’s getting stronger, going to PT and OT, getting dressed, getting out of bed—and suddenly, we have a new problem: How the hell do we get her to a doctor’s appointment? In the hospital, the doctors came to Mom. Now that...

A month earlier, I was sitting beside my mom’s hospital bed, watching a machine breathe for her and wondering if she was going to make it. Now? She was getting ready to leave the hospital. Not for home. Not yet. She was heading to long-term care rehab — and for the first time in weeks, it felt like we might actually be moving in the right direction. But if you’ve learned anything about caregiving,...

Welcome to caregiving, where you are suddenly promoted to Director of Google, Phone Calls, and Making Decisions Nobody Trained You For. In this episode of The Wicked Daughter , I’m deep in the trenches of finding a skilled nursing facility and rehabilitation facility for my aging parent —which, honestly, feels a lot like using a dating app. You keep expanding your radius, hoping someone will accep...

Mom was finally getting better. Her lungs were improving. Her heart was stable. Her broken leg was healing. So why were we suddenly talking about hospital discharge ? Discharge? She's Not Even Out of Bed!! That was the moment I realized caregiving was changing. I wasn't just trying to get my 88-year-old mom through a medical crisis anymore. I was suddenly trying to figure out what came n...

I thought I finally understood what happened after a hospital stay: you went home, or you went to rehab. Then someone introduced me to an acute care hospital—a type of hospital I'd never even heard of. So what exactly is an acute care hospital? How is it different from a regular hospital or rehabilitation facility? Who takes care of patients there? And why would an aging parent need one? In t...

Mom survived the ICU. She was finally breathing on her own. The crisis was over. Or so I thought. Recovery turned out to be a whole new battle. One day we're celebrating a successful swallow test. Great, mom can eat but she can't hold a fork. Her oxygen improves, but a new complication pops up. Every tiny victory seems to come with another hurdle. In this episode of The Wicked Daughter ,...

When my mom was admitted to the hospital after being hit by a car, I made a decision that would weigh heavily on me for weeks. I didn't give the hospital her Do Not Resuscitate order. It wasn't because I didn't know her wishes. I did. It wasn't because I wasn't willing to honor them. I was. I believed this accident wasn't the situation she had envisioned when she made...

Hospital Time teaches you patience. ICU Time teaches you endurance. The first full day after my mom was placed on a ventilator was an endless cycle of waiting, hoping, and bracing for whatever came next. Every decision depended on a CT scan. Every small victory came with another setback. And every hour reminded me just how fragile recovery can be. In this episode of The Wicked Daughter , I share w...

For the first time since my mom's accident, it finally feels like we're moving in the right direction. After days of hospital stays, setbacks, and learning what it really means to become a family caregiver overnight, we're finally seeing progress. Mom is getting stronger, working with physical therapy, and every small victory feels like another step toward recovery. If you're c...

When the phone rings at 2:45 in the morning, you already know your night is over. Just when it seemed like Mom had survived the worst, a new complication appeared—AFib. Overnight, I found myself learning another medical term, coordinating multiple specialists, and discovering that being a caregiver often means making sure one doctor's treatment doesn't create another doctor's proble...

New here? Welcome! This podcast follows my real caregiving story -  managing my aging parent, one meltdown at a time. If you'd like to hear how it all began, start with Episode 1: Welcome to the Right Waiting Room . Caregiving isn't always about doing more. Sometimes it's about making sure the important things don't quietly fall through the cracks. While waiting days for Mom&ap...

One phone call changed everything. One minute I was just a daughter. The next, I was navigating hospitals, impossible decisions, and a role nobody ever prepares you for: caregiver. In this first episode, I share how I became The Wicked Daughter —not because I was mean, controlling, or bossy...but because loving an aging parent sometimes means becoming the person who takes away the car keys, argues...

The sheriff said Mom was alive. That was the good news. Everything after that...got complicated. In this episode, I take you inside the emergency room, where fear, uncertainty, and "hospital time" collide. If you've ever waited hours for answers that never seemed to come, replayed worst-case scenarios in your head, or discovered that every medical update somehow creates three new qu...

"The doctor will be with you shortly." "It shouldn't be much longer." If you've ever waited in a hospital, you know those words can mean absolutely anything. In this episode of The Wicked Daughter , surgery is scheduled... then mysteriously canceled... after the cafeteria apparently gets the memo before the nurses. Between endless waiting, another day without food, an...

Nobody hands you a manual for becoming a caregiver. They just hand you a clipboard. No one prepares you for the waiting. The worrying. The impossible decisions. Or the moments so completely absurd that you can't help but laugh. The Wicked Daughter is an honest, darkly funny podcast about the real life of caring for an aging parent. Because no one should have to navigate this journey alone. Yo...