Hi, I’m Maggie Thorne.
I take care of my grandma, who has Alzheimer’s. I also live with chronic illness of my own, work full-time in healthcare communications, and am someone’s wife, sister, daughter, and friend. Somewhere underneath all of that, there’s a voice (“Mildred”) that keeps insisting none of it is enough and that I should be doing more, working harder, holding it together better than I am.
This blog is where all of that lives, out loud.
My job happens to be in healthcare communications, spending most of my days helping people make sense of the rules, the letters, and the fine print that decides so much and explains so little. For a long time, that felt separate from the rest of my life. Then it collided with the rest of my life, the way things do, and I found myself sitting across from my grandmother’s care team using the same knowledge I use at work, except this time it wasn’t a case file. It was her.
But this isn’t only a caregiving blog, and it isn’t only a healthcare blog. It’s also about what it’s like to manage a body that doesn’t always cooperate, to show up at work anyway, to be present in a marriage while running on fumes, and to keep fighting a voice in your head that never seems satisfied. I don’t think any of that happens in isolation from the rest. It’s all one life, carried at the same time.
Some days, writing here means the hard stuff. It means writing about the grief that shows up before the actual loss, the exhaustion of managing my own health while managing hers, the small moments that break my heart at 4pm on a Tuesday for no obvious reason. Other days, it means the practical stuff like making sure she has groceries, her bills are paid, and taking her to doctor’s appointments. And some days, it means confronting that inner voice and arguing back because I’d rather use this space to talk back to her than just quietly carry her.
And some days, it just means finding something funny. Because all of this is heavy, and I think we do ourselves a disservice when we pretend it has to be one thing all the time.
The name of this blog comes from a simple truth I’ve learned: caregiving flattens time. Days blur together. Tuesday can feel like Thursday, which can feel like the same unnamed day you’ve lived a dozen times this month. Some days really are just Tuesdays that are nothing special, nothing terrible, just another one to get through. And somehow, that’s its own kind of okay.
A note on privacy: I write under a pen name, and I don’t use my grandmother’s name or identifying details about either of us. This is intentional. Writing honestly about something this personal requires some distance, and I want the freedom to tell the truth here — the good, the hard, and the occasionally absurd — without worrying about who might recognize us. I hope you understand, and I hope it doesn’t get in the way of what I’m really trying to do, which is connect with anyone else walking a version of this same road.
If you’re a caregiver, someone managing a chronic illness, someone trying to quiet their own inner critic, or someone who just found this because it looked interesting — welcome. I’m glad you’re here.
New posts every week.
