BONUS: The Reality Of Being A Carer

Okay, Ash, would you mind kinda sharing a little bit about yourself and how you came to be in a caring role?

Yeah, thank you.

My husband became critically ill about two and a bit years ago when our daughter was eight months old.

It was a really sudden illness that happened in a matter of, uh, hours, and he ended up having a nearly three to four-month ICU stay, followed by a seven-month hospital stay, where at the end of it he's had to learn to walk, talk, eat, breathe, all from the beginning.

So he now has some sort of significant health implications as a result of that.

But we've been incredibly lucky that we went from, I guess, a position where we didn't think he would be here to, if he did come through it, that there would be some really limited sort of outcomes for him, to in a position where he's now walking, talking, eating, breathing, and we're looking at, well, what does this next stage of our life look like with some of those caveats and restrictions.

Mm-hmm.

And it's a very different life to the one we went into, the one we went into to have our daughter.

But it is still a very force of life, but our roles have fundamentally changed in what that looks like moving forward.

Thank you for sharing, first of all.

And we did give the Wiggatonis a little bit of context about how this kind of bonus episode came to be.

Would you feel comfortable sharing with the Wiggatonis, kind of in your words, how it felt to listen to our initial episode or our initial conversation as a carer? Like, the things that you really felt were missing from that conversation from a lived experience perspective.

And [chuckles] you will not offend us at all.

You cannot offend us.

We are just trying to flesh out this conversation in a way that is much more meaningful.

Yeah.

Thank you so much.

And can I just thank you and Kay for your incredible response to my feedback.

So, I hope my feedback was relatively nuanced.

Um, but also-

It was.

It was, it was lovely.

Like, I honestly got the message and I was like, "Yeah, yeah, you're 100% right."

Oh, thank you.

But just, I guess, for anyone listening to know how well you've handled that feedback, and the fact that you've also offered this opportunity to come and share a story about a topic that there is relatively little about, particularly in a bit of the niche that I sit as someone in their early 30s with a young family.