Episode 525: Navigating the Sandwich Generation

No need to whine, it's whiny palooza. Have some wine and join us on the whiny palooza podcast with Rebecca Greene.

Welcome to the whiny palooza podcast. I'm your host, Rebecca Greene. I'm a wife, mother of 3, and licensed clinical social worker. I also have 3 fur babies at home too. My passion has always been to help children and their families. I always dreamed of being a wife and a mother. Parents are always learning through their struggles, failures, and successes and joys. I am no stranger to this wild ride of parenting, and I know behind every great parent lies a team of supportive friends and family. I want to be part of your support system. I want you to know that you are not alone. We are in this parenting world together. Join me every week for insightful discussions with experts on parenting and marriage, as well as other parents who have found the secret to successes in parenthood. You'll learn tips and tricks to make life with your family better than ever. I hope you will follow along with me while we dive into what it takes to achieve a happy family. Hello everyone, this is Rebecca Greene for the Whiny Plouza podcast, and I am very excited today because I get to talk to the wonderful Irene Iris Weichler. Iris, thank you so much for being here with me today.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it, Rebecca Greene.

She is the sweetest lady. She's— I'm supposed to be making her feel comfortable. I want you all to know she's making me feel comfortable. I already told her I can tell she's a fantastic social worker.

Well, my book is called Role Reversal, right?

Well, we certainly reversed roles today, I'll tell you. I will tell you. So, um, I'm gonna tell you all about this beautiful lady. Iris is a medical social worker with over 40 years of experience specializing in infertility and aging caregiving issues. She is the award-winning author of 3 books. There's another one coming out, right? Is that 4?

Yeah, that'll be— well, actually, that'll be, um, yeah, number 4.

Okay, we'll talk about— we're going to talk about all her books. And she's received 14 book awards for her work supporting individuals and families through emotionally complex life transitions. Her latest book, Role Reversal: How to Take Care of Yourself and Your Aging Parents, addresses the realities of caregiving burnout, family dynamics, and the emotional toll of supporting aging parents while maintaining personal well-being. Iris is also a longtime blog contributor and freelance health writer with more than 20 years of experience creating accessible, compassionate content for the public. Through her work, Iris helps caregivers, parents, and families navigate stress, boundaries, communication, and self-care with honesty and practical guidance. So now everyone knows why I couldn't wait to talk to you. This is a very hot topic. Um, I was telling Iris this has been asked for by multiple people. That is why we found Iris for you. Um, I want to know, I want to start with you. I want to find out what drew you to social work and how did infertility and caregiving become your focus?

Well, it's funny, I lived near a hospital when I was growing up, and I said someday I'm going to work at that hospital. I didn't know what I was going to do. And wow, I went to college and I started, uh, in psych. And the psych department there was working with rats. And I said I didn't want to work with rats. I wanted to work with people.

Yeah.

So that's how I ended up going into social work. And I did go back to that hospital and I, I loved it. I worked on the physical medicine and rehabilitation unit, and those were people that came in with very catastrophic problems. Burn patients, amputees, head injuries. Strokes, neurological disorders. So I worked with every patient that came on my unit and all of their families, and I just loved it. I loved working with them. I was amazed at their resilience. I was amazed at their courage, and they were very open to working with me. So that's how I became a social worker. And I also started— when I started, I worked with actually people that were committing child abuse. I started with kids and adolescents and moved from there to the hospitals. Wow. And so in terms of infertility and caregiving and aging, infertility was something I experienced. Mm-hmm. And so I had firsthand knowledge. I kind of made it my mission when I write to— I really feel, and I saw this at the hospital, my first book was called "Patient Power," How to Have a Say During Your Hospital Stay. And the reason I wrote it was I was walking by one of my patients' rooms and their family was outside sobbing. And I looked in the room and all that was happening was a resident was doing an EKG just to, to get a baseline. Nothing was happening. And I realized that the resident hadn't told them what was going on. They thought he was dying. And the resident would have taken one second to tell them, they would have been fine. And so I ended up writing a book, my first book, just what, how do you manage when you're in a crisis? And so that's sort of been a theme through all of my books. Caregiving and aging happened because I ended up being a caregiver for my parents. My mother died very young, she was only 56. Oh no. Had cancer, first breast cancer and then She recovered nicely, and then she went for her 5-year checkup and it had metastasized to her brain. Oh Lord, that was really rough.

I'm so sorry. Oh, thanks.

And then my father, God bless him, he lived to be 97. Wow, he was really something. But he also— I, you know, we ended up having to take care of him too as he got older. Um, so I, I saw that early on with my patients in the hospital, but it was a theme that carried on as I became an adult. I also helped two friends who were my age who were dying. They didn't have family close, so their family of choice became their caregivers. So I was a part of that process as well. Wow. Yeah.

So you have quite the experience to help us with this topic.

Yeah, I feel like I I have a few things to say.

Well, and I think what I'm hearing from people that I talk to is that I feel like caregiver burnout is talked about, but it's not understood.

Yeah.

Can you tell people like, what does the burnout look like?

Sure. I want to start by saying 65% of caregivers are women.

Yes.

And we are wonderful people, but, and we're very happy to help others before we help ourselves. We sacrifice our own health.

It's true.

Because we can't say no when people, our family and friends, ask us to do things. And so that's one of the reasons burnout happens. And what happens is there's several symptoms to look for. The reason we get burned out is we can't say no, we feel guilty about not taking care of someone that we love, We're really bad at asking for help. And because we perceive asking for help as being a personal failure, and it's not. That's one thing I would tell your listeners, to reframe it. Asking for help can be a position of strength, particularly when you're trying to do something for someone you care about that you don't know how to do or that you can't do. And so what happens is symptoms of burnout, the physical symptoms are tension in your neck, tension in your muscles, body aches, headaches, and things like that. Psychologically, what happens is we get very depressed, we get anxious, we isolate because we feel an obligation to be with the person that we're taking care of and we feel it's some guilt trying to do something to take care of ourselves, or we don't really want to go out and have fun. We feel badly about that, or we don't have the energy. Other symptoms are we sleep too little. I can remember when my dad was sick in his final years, laying in bed at midnight waiting for the phone to ring because— Oh gosh. That's when he ended up going in the hospital a lot in the middle of the night, and it got to the point I felt like Norman Cheers. When I walked in the ER, everyone said, "Hi, Iris." Oh no! So, and so, so I would just be awake waiting for the phone to ring. Too much sleep or not enough sleep, as I said, are symptoms. Also, sometimes people will behaviorally turn to alcohol or drugs just to get by, so that's another red light symptom. Eating is another symptom, either you don't eat anything or you eat too much. So, those are some of the main symptoms, the psychological ones I mentioned, depression, anxiety, hopelessness. Hopelessness, helplessness. It can spill over to another behavioral thing is irritability. You get really frustrated and angry at people, not because of them, but because your nerves are so raw, you're so overwhelmed. So that's— those are some of the main things that I would say to look out for in terms of burnout. And if those things are happening, you need to either Well, for sure, to find help, to get additional help, to identify people that you can, either in your family or organizations that can help you, to talk to your doctor, to see or to consult programs in your immediate area, like senior centers or areas on aging, or if you're working with a hospital with a social worker, that was one of my jobs, was to help link people up with services in their communities. Because there's a lot out there, and particularly like Medicare covers some things, and there are, there may be some financial resources available to help. The other thing that I always tell people that they don't know, there are people like me, social workers and nurses, all around the country, and there's a website called aginglifecare.org. And wherever you are, if you put in the zip code, you should be able to find someone like me who has expertise and can come in and say, "This is the kind of help you need. I can help you find it." And it's particularly helpful in, in the world we live in today. Geographically, we're very apart from our families. And so if, particularly if you don't live physically near your loved one that needs help, One of the things that the geriatric social worker could do is be a mediator for you and sort of tell you what's going on and then stay in touch with you to help coordinate things.

I mean, you said so much in that. That was so much good information. And of course, I formed a bunch of questions based on what you just said.

Yeah, that's fine.

Okay, so what do you feel like the early signs are? Like, I'm getting burned out, I better do something? Like, what are some early signs to catch it quick?

Well, a lot of caregivers, the majority I said were women, and the majority are between 40s and 50s, and for 40s and 60s. And those are people that are in the sandwich generation. Those are people that are simultaneously trying to take care of their parents while they're trying to raise their kids. And so the image that comes to my mind always is, you know, those guys that have sticks and they're spinning, spinning the plates and they're trying to keep them all going without falling. That's exactly what it is. You're a parent, you're a caregiver, you may have a job, you're a wife or mother or a sister, or you're a friend, and those are all the plates that are spinning. And so When you feel— you begin to feel overwhelmed with any one of those tasks, that's a sign that you're spreading yourself too thin, that there are too many things going on. And particularly, a lot— the majority of these people have jobs, too. And the employers are not very sympathetic. They're not really good about letting people have a little flexibility at work, particularly when there's a crisis going on with the person that you're taking care of.

So, well, and I'm thinking about, you know, and I just realized I've never asked my mother questions about this, but, you know, I have vivid memories of her working, taking care of her own family and house, and running over to take care of her mother. And I think in that scenario, the question that I have is, you know, if I had to guess, my grandma wanted her, you know what I mean? So like What's hard is that I think that the aging parent wants their kid, and they don't necessarily want a stranger coming in.

It depends. I would say that can be true, but depending on the nature of the task and the kind of help they need, an aging parent might not want their son or daughter to bathe them if they needed help with bathing. That's true.

That's true.

So it depends on the nature of the task. Here's one of the things that I always recommend to people. One of the things that we avoid doing is talking with our parents, like you just said, I never asked my mom.

I've never asked my mom.

Most of us never ask our moms and dads, how do you envision your life as you age? We don't. So, I call it, it's the caregiver conversation. As I told you, my mother died very young. She was 56, and it didn't even occur to us to have that conversation with her because she was young. And so people avoid it because who wants to talk about mortality? Who wants to talk about needing help? Who wants to talk about sickness? Nobody really wants to talk about that, but it's so important to talk about it early when your parents are not in the middle of a healthcare crisis, when your parents are of sound mind and they are healthy. Because what happened with my mother was her cancer spread to her brain and I couldn't get a question answered from her anyways. Her cognition was really bad. So I rectified that mistake with my father and he was more than willing. So you sit down and you say, I really love you. I want you to have the longest, most quality life you can have. How can we work together to make that happen? And so one of the questions you ask is, when you, when you are older, if medical problems come up, do you see yourself staying at home, or would you be okay going somewhere where there's more help? Do you want family to take care of you? Would you be open to healthcare professionals coming in if you need help with things that we can't help you with. You want to ask them about— you want to know about what their insurance is, you want to know about what their medications are, you want to have someone designated as a healthcare proxy or healthcare power of attorney so when decisions need to be made, you know what who's going to be making them, and you want to make sure that that person is comfortable making those decisions. My father made me the person to make decisions for my mother because he didn't feel comfortable doing it. So you want to make sure that those things are in place. And this isn't a one-time conversation, by the way. This is a, this is a door opener. So even if it goes nowhere, the doors open a crack Yeah. And so maybe down the line you say, "My friend Janice, who you know, her mother fell down and broke her leg and had to go to the hospital, and it made me start thinking about you and worrying about you," to your parents. "Do you have any more thoughts about what we began to talk about?" And that's the way you do it. And you frame it as a collaboration, not a confrontation. Mm-hmm. I love that because so many people go in and they, you know, all of a sudden the adult child becomes the parent.

Yeah.

And a lot of parents don't like that.

No, they don't want that at all.

No. And actually the adult children don't want to be the ones to do that either. It just doesn't turn out very well for anybody. So if you frame it with, I really want to work with you to see what we can do to make your wishes happen. That takes a lot of the friction out of it. And it— yeah, in families when there's multiple siblings or whatever, you identify the person that's the best one for that, for that conversation, because they don't want to be attacked. They don't want everyone around them. And so identify a member of the family that's best equipped to have that conversation and, and have them be sort of the spokesperson. And there may come a point in time where you include everybody and you, and the siblings are there and all that sort of thing. And but not initially, because otherwise our parents may feel ganged up on or they may not, they may not like it.

So that's really good advice. All of that is really good advice. And I, and I know some parents want to stay home, some parents want to go somewhere else, and they both have different challenges. So my question from watching my friends with their parents when they go to a facility, they have not been happy with the care that their parents receive. So how do we as the adult children make sure that our parents are getting well cared for? Any advice for that?

Yeah, a couple of things that come to mind, 2 or 3 things that, that Aging Life Care person that I mentioned can help, or a social worker at a hospital can help. There are different places that you want to look for a place that has accreditation. Mm-hmm. You want to visit the place at first without your parent, and you want to have a tour. You, when you're looking at a place, you want to look at how clean it is. You want to look at all the different floors, not the one, even if your parent doesn't need much care, because there may be a point where they'll be going to a care that requires a floor that requires more care. You want to ask about the patient ratio to staff, how many nurses per patient, how many nurses aides. You want to find out about doctors and what doctors are there and would visit. You want to find out about if they have other programming like art therapy or recreational therapy, because again, that helps in terms of quality of life. This happened with my dad. My dad was living in the house that I was born in. He was cleaning the gutters in his 80s and shoveling snow. And I go— I went on vacation and I came home and I said, what's new? And he said, I sold the house. And I was— I thought he was joking. I said, that's really funny, Dad. He said, no, no, I sold the house. And I said, when do you need to be out? And he said, in 3 weeks. Oh my gosh, where do you want to go? And he said, well, I, I thought you'd help me find a place.

In 3 weeks.

In 3 weeks. I had to do an estate sale and close up his house and find him a place to live.

Oh my gosh.

So, so, and also you can, you can, you can go online and people will have reviews of places too. You can check and make sure if a place has been cited by the health department or whatever, but you really get a feel or sense for a place. So what I did was I went and looked at several places and I narrowed it down to 2 that I thought I would feel comfortable with and that he would feel comfortable with. My dad was really into food. That's his number one thing. He lived for food. So I arranged for us to have a meal at each place. That's perfect. They were happy to do that. And while we were sitting there eating his meal, I started chatting with other residents and family members to get their impressions about what, what's so smart. And I got a lot of information about that, so it worked really well. And in fact, when, um, when my dad went to one of the places, he was a World War II vet, and so I asked if there were any other World War II vets, and there were. So I arranged for him to meet them.

Wow, that— you did such a good job.

Well, that's what I'm telling, telling your listeners. Those are tricks. Those are things you can do. When we got to the place, the place he was at one place for a while, and then he decided the food wasn't so great. There was a new cook, so I helped move him to another place. But the first thing we did was I, I, we went and he introduced himself to the chef. Oh my gosh, the person that seated them in the dining room. And so, and he felt it was that And so I gave him some control. That's why.

Yes.

Sorry, he felt he was making the decision. He— it was sort of, it was sort of cute that he, he liked it, like he was deciding this was the place, the food was good enough, and he made friends. He was very proud of his friendship with the cook at the place he was at. And also he had— he was really like to work out, and they had a gym there. And so one of the— when we went on a tour, I helped him figure out what questions to ask. And one of his questions was, what time does the gym open, and do you have a treadmill, do you have the things that he wanted to use? And it made the transition much easier for him. He felt some control. He got to ask questions. The things that were most important to him were there. And it was really funny because one of the places he'd work out really early in the morning, and when he'd come out, the the guy that was the security guard would salute him, and he was very proud of that because he would watch my dad work out. And my dad thought— helped— it made him feel like it was a special place because of things like that.

Did he work out like up into his late age?

Oh yeah, he worked out all the time, all— every day.

That is amazing.

Well, he was, he was, he was a scrap, scrap metal dealer. He, he would fill barrels pieces of scrap metal, 300-pound barrels, and he would lift them. That was his job. That job put all of his kids through college. But so he was very physical and he liked working out. So it was real, and that was one of the things we talked about in our care vagabond conversation. I need to have a place that I can work out. So I was like, no problem, we'll find you a place. And that was really great.

Well, no wonder he lived to be in his 90s. We need to work out, people.

Well, and, and, you know, I would say this, another thing, um, when you, if you do transition, have your folks go to a, a place, either a skilled nursing facility or assisted living or whatever. And the differences are assisted living can be an independent apartment in a place where, as you need more help, my mother-in-law currently is in assisted living. She has an independent apartment, but for— and she has a kitchen, but for meals she goes upstairs to a dining room. There are pull cords in the apartment that if she should fall.

Perfect.

And also they— she calls them every morning when she wakes up. If they don't get a call from the resident, they check on the residents to make sure that they're safe.

Oh, I love that.

There's lots of different levels of care. If if she needed more help in the building she's at, we could move her into a place where she could have an aide or someone with her. And some places have all the way up to skilled nursing for people that need more care where they may— might need skin care, or they might be on IVs, or they might need help with dressing and bathing. So when you're looking, that's one of the things to think about and figure out. Another thing that's really good is, I'm sure your listeners have seen commercials for A Place for Mom. That is a program that's free across the country, and you can call them and they're familiar, they have local people that will help you find places for people to go.

Well, that's wonderful.

At no charge.

Lots of resources. There's lots of resources.

Yeah.

Just have to find them.

Right.

So there's a word that I want you to help people with that I don't think we're all very good at, and that word is boundaries. So can we talk about important boundaries that caregivers need to set?

Yes, yes, really important when you're a caregiver to include time to take care of yourself. Now that could mean shutting the door and taking a bubble bath with a glass of wine. That could mean going out with a friend to dinner. That could be going out to a movie. But you want to find activities and things to nourish yourself, because if you don't take care of yourself, you're not going to be a very good caregiver for somebody else. So that's very important. And what you can do And you want to identify other people that can step in. You want to build a support network or a caregiving team. It can't be a team of one. Because again, we're talking about sandwich generation where people are taking care of their kids. They might have to— if the kid is sick and is at home, or they might need to go to a parent-teacher conference or watch a school play or whatever. And so you need to fill in those gaps. And so that might be a sibling that can come in given times a week. What I tell people to do is identify the tasks that are needed. It might be grocery shopping, it might be laundry, it might be helping mom and dad or dad out of bed every day. It might be someone that knows something about medical bills. It might be paying insurance claims. It might be all of those. So you make a list of what's needed. And again, I'll use myself as a personal example. I have a sister that lives locally with me, so she helped with the physical visiting my parents. But I have a sister that lives in England, but she wanted to help, and so she helped get us an aide to come in and take care of my father. And he didn't even know that we were paying people to come and take care of him. He thought they were friendly people where he worked and they would stop in.

Oh my gosh.

So, so she helped that way. My sister and I were— we needed a break, and my brother lives in San Francisco, and so he came in and he, he stayed with my dad. My dad was in the hospital for a bit when my sister and I, the one time my sister here locally and I were gone, we were out of the country when my dad fell ill. And so my brother, but my brother came in and stayed with him until we could come back. So having more than one person on your team, and you think of it as a team, is super, super important.

Well, yeah, and we all fall into this trap of, whether it's the kids or whoever, that we need to do all of it and we can't do all of it.

Right. That's exactly right. And there may be neighbors, there may be people in your church or your place of worship that are more than happy to bring a casserole so you don't have to cook. There's, there's a lot of people out there. And also, if, if your loved one is reasonably healthy and can get out, there are adult day programs, senior centers and things. Yeah. And socialization is super important. Important. There are 5 things that help us live a long and healthy life. One of them is socialization. People that don't have that tend to not live as long. So providing, and that gets them out, it gives you a break. So if you can figure out things like that to do that allow you to have that time, that's really important.

Well, and I hear so much guilt. I think guilt is another word that they need help for, help with.

Yeah.

So how do we help them get rid of the any guilt that they're feeling?

Well, I'll go back to what I said earlier. Taking care of yourself is helping to take care of them. And so again, women are so bad at saying no, but saying— allowing ourselves to say no without guilt, knowing that when we say no, it's for the right reasons. Makes a huge difference. And so I don't know how to do an IV. I don't. So you can't feel guilty when you're asking someone to help with something that you don't know how to do. Even if your parents say, I only want you to take care of me, it just doesn't make sense to not have someone that's knowledgeable. And the example we can go back to before, if my mom or dad needed help with bathing, they would prefer someone else to do it rather than me. So it's very— and you can even address that. You can even say to your aging loved one, I think you'd feel more comfortable if an expert, someone that knows how to do this, came in. And Medicare actually would pay for someone to come in with a doctor's order to do something like that. So those are ways to alleviate guilt. And the message you keep giving yourself is If I get burned out, if I can't do this, everyone suffers. My children, my spouses, my friends, my— and the people that I'm taking care of. So it's a selfless act to say no and to be able to do it without guilt.

Such good advice. You have so much good advice. I think that what I'm hearing is that caregivers don't realize that they're caregivers. I don't know why that is.

Oh, well, I think they do realize it, but I think they don't recognize the toll it takes. It's hard to quantify the emotional toll it takes. It's hard to quantify the physical toll it takes. And again, it's one thing if that's the only job you have and that's the only thing you're doing, but if you amplify that— and just being a parent is a full-time job, and we're working at a place where you have a job— is a, is a time job. So when you think about, you may have 3 or 4 or 5 full-time jobs. Nobody, nobody can do that. Nobody can do that.

For some reason, you know, I would like to change this, women think that they have superpowers.

Oh yeah.

But we are human beings and we have to all slow down.

Yeah, I totally agree. I totally—

it's interesting that we think that we are like, you know, extraordinary, or we think no one can do it as good as we can. Yes.

Yes.

That's good. That's a good one.

Yeah. And the answer is, I'm sorry, but yes, other people can. And you want to be okay with that?

Yes.

Okay.

Yes. That was really good. Well, and I want to talk about your— I want to talk about lots of your books, but I want to talk about the book Role Reversal.

Okay. Okay.

So tell us about your message. Like, what— tell us about this book. Tell us what makes it different. Tell us everybody needs to go get it. Tell us why.

Thank you. Um, well, I have a philosophy in my book when I write a book, and the philosophy is I want to empower my readers. And all of my books are based on the notion it's about someone who's in crisis and they feel vulnerable and they feel alone and they feel helpless. And so What I do is I blend my personal experience with my professional expertise. And because I'm a social worker, I also want to give resources to people so they don't feel alone and they don't feel as helpless. So Role Reversal is basically the story of my father and his life. And there are universal themes that come up when— as people age. My dad was 97 when he died. And I use that as a springboard to help other people who are going to experience the same things that I did, meaning my father got to a point where he couldn't live alone, and then we had to figure out where he should go, what kind of care he needed. He didn't recognize when he needed to go to the doctor. And so all of those themes are in the book. And then I— the last part of Role Reversal is a chapter on resources and where you can go for help. I talk about the caregiver conversation in there. I also talk about the legal stuff, what paperwork should be in place. People don't even think about addressing that, about having a living will or the power of a healthcare power of attorney or a power of attorney. I talk about knowing where the paperwork is. If your parent gets sick and suddenly, and you don't know, you don't know where their, their, uh, medic— what their medications are, who their doctor is, you don't know what insurance they have. And if you're having to apply for Medicaid, you need to know about their financial situation to know if they'd be eligible. There's all these questions. And so that's in the book, those kinds of things. Lots of times people have those, that kind of stuff in a safe deposit box, their will and things like that. Well, if your adult kid isn't on that box, they can't get into the box to get that information. So it's to help people be proactive, to be prepared, and to know what to do.

I mean, so many things that I haven't even thought of. So many things, you know. And the other thing is, you know, I'm so thankful that I have my parents, and so they have each other. So I don't think about a lot of these things because they have each other.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, I mean, you've got my wheels turning, lots of things to think about.

Yeah, well, I was just going to say, it's really devastating when people have been together for so many years and then suddenly one partner is gone. My, like I said, my mother died very young, and one day my dad said, my dad told me he was, he'd gone out to this bar, and it was a bar that I frequented, and I said, what were you doing there? And he said, I, um, I realized I want to start dating, is what he said, and he didn't know where to begin or what to do. And, and so we had this conversation about that, and, and I ended up helping him know about a senior program where you could meet people to date. And we also talked about the fact I couldn't just pop in in the house anytime that I wanted to after that. But it's that kind of, it's that kind of stuff. I mean, he ended up meeting a woman at this program that he dated for 20-some-odd years after that. And it was, it was great. It was really nice for him. They traveled together. It was a nice companion. So there's all kinds of things that that arise when you're sort of switching those roles and things are happening.

Well, tell us about— you said you have a new book. I know you have other books. Tell us the new book info and any book info you want us to have.

Okay. My infertility book is called Riding the Infertility Roller Coaster. That I wrote before Role Reversal, and it's called A Guide to Educate and Inspire. And again, it's similar. I went through infertility. I interviewed a bunch of people that made different decisions about building their families. And so I think it's really important to hear from other people's experience. That's very valuable. And so I interviewed people and then again, Riding the Infertility Roller Coaster looks at what options are available, gives you information about what questions to ask and where to go for resources. My new book is, which is hopefully coming out in a couple of weeks, And you can find all of these books on Amazon. You can also, you can order them in a local bookstore if they're not there. But my new book is called "Burned Out," and it stemmed from talking to a neighbor of mine who was a firefighter for 30 years. And we don't really think about the repeated traumas that they have to face, and they don't have anywhere to go with that sometimes. And how does that affect their families? We just know that when in an emergency, these people are here for us. And I thought it was really important to take a look at that and examine that. So I interviewed people around the country, men and women, because women are different in terms of first responders, how they respond emotionally, how they respond physically. And I interviewed people who gave me incredible information and personal stories about their experiences as first responders. And then I also interviewed family members to talk about what it's like for them to have a first responder as a spouse or a parent. And I look at the psychological toll that it takes and also the physical toll. And again, I have a chapter about resources. I also talk about how to talk to your kids about it and what information kids should have so that they kind of understand what's going on and they're aware. 'Cause they pick up on signals when parents, they're stressed or there's anxiety or there's depression. They see it and sometimes they have the words to talk about it, sometimes they don't. So I talk about how to have conversations with your kids about stress and anxiety and trauma. So that will also be on Amazon and that will be in bookstores or can be ordered through bookstores. And like I said, I'm hoping 2 weeks, 2 or 3 weeks, it'll be out.

Well, you've written amazing resources for us and you've given us so much valuable information. Is there anything that you want to leave caregivers with? Information that I didn't ask you?

I would say this. I, Monday through Friday, I post articles to help caregivers and to help people dealing with infertility. And so I wanted to just share my websites. My social media with you guys, your listeners, so that they can, they can look at it. I, and also I have a, um, my own author page right now. Burned Out won't be on it, we're developing a new one, but this has infertility and caregiving resources, and it's iwaichlerwpengine.com. So it's, it's iwaichler wpengine.com, and there's tons of information there, uh, podcasts I've done, articles I've written, books, resources, everything. That's for that. I'm on Facebook Monday through Friday. For aging and caregiving, my site is facebook.com/role-reversal-1. And for Infertility, it's irisweichler.com/infertilityrollercoaster. And finally, I'm on Twitter and I post, I twit— well, it's X now, and I post those same articles there. And I'm on Twitter as twitter.com/irisweichler.

So my wonderful producer Adrian will put all of that in show notes for you guys, I'm sure. And, um, I want to bring you back. I want to bring you back to talk about infertility, if you would do that with me.

Sure.

Because I know that you also specialize in that, and I thought it would be too much to talk about two topics today. So I'm so glad that we could cover a, um, requested topic from my listeners. I know it was needed. I know so many people need you and your resources. So I can't thank you enough for joining me today and giving us so much to think about and learn from.

Oh, it's been my pleasure. Thank you, Rebecca.

This is Rebecca Greene, and I want to remind everyone to spend every day laughing, learning, and loving. Thank you for tuning in to the Winey Palooza podcast. If you like what you heard, please be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. While you are there, leave a review. I love to hear your feedback. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time. This show has been produced by Market Domination LLC. To discover how you can have your own show completely done for you and turn it into a real published book and become the authority in your marketplace, go to www.marketdominationllc.com/podcastoffer.