I didn’t grow up wanting to be a nurse, or have the calling. After the Army I married my wife, who was in the Air Force, and I was working as a lifeguard at a theme park and selling women’s clothing over the phone. I was happy, but we were broke.

So my new father-in-law pulled me aside and suggested I find something that would help provide for his little girl. He was a 6-foot-6 Italian man with a bushy mustache, hair halfway down his back, and had been an artilleryman in Vietnam. He was a nurse, and I thought, if he could do it, I could too. That way of thinking has gotten me into trouble more than a few times in my life.

So I became a CNA, then a medication aide, then an LVN, and spent most of the next twenty years working with veterans with spinal cord injuries. Some of those guys had known me since I was a student. We grew older together so a lot of days, I was caring for friends.

I’ve fumbled through plenty, and twenty years in nursing doesn’t mean I know everything about your person or your life or want to claim I’m some guru, but it did give me experience I can share, including things I learned the hard way.

A conversation with a spinal cord injury patient helped set this in motion. He was grateful for the months of rehabilitation he received through the VA, and was telling me about someone with a similar injury who had gone home after a much shorter stay, and with far less preparation.

I had spent most of my career inside a specialty system where we worked to prepare people and their families, and was unaware of how different that experience could be outside it. It disturbed me, so I started writing about spinal cord injury care, but the book kept growing. Families needed help with medications, mobility, and personal care, but also exhaustion, family conflict, grief, and the loss of their own identity.

That’s who I mean by the UnMedical Caregiver: the unpaid, untrained family member or friend doing nursing-level tasks at home because life didn’t ask permission first.

UnMedical is meant to be a bridge between those families and the professionals caring for their person.

I think it’s awesome that bringing attention to male caregivers is one of y’all’s goals.

I think men get overlooked partly because people picture a wife or daughter when they hear “caregiver.” A guy might say he’s “looking after Mom” without even identifying himself as one. Early in my nursing career, people often assumed I was the doctor simply because I was a man. Those expectations run deep.

But I’ve met some amazing dudes caring for their partners. One man’s wife needed total care after an injury early in their marriage, and they had a small child. I thought the world of him. Over the years, I watched those two raise their daughter and get to rocking the grandparent game. He knew his person, advocated for her fiercely, and worked wonderfully with the staff.

That husband understood the importance of building a team he trusted so he could ride his motorcycle through the Hill Country a couple times a month. His wife was cared for, and he could get his knees in the breeze and be himself for a few hours. To me, that’s what real self-care looks like.

And now we’re starting to see that 'no-good son' who dropped out of community college, lives in the basement, sitting around playing video games suddenly stepping up. The person nobody saw coming to the rescue is out there delivering rockstar care. We're also seeing a whole new generation emerge like teenagers balancing school while taking care of family at home.

You can do everything right and still watch someone decline, which is tough to accept when you measure your worth by fixing things.

What helps is keeping it simple. Don't be afraid to ask basic questions, focus on "What needs doing, and how do I do it?", and separate your frustration with the disease from the person you love.

Joining a condition-specific support group is huge. You don't have to explain your whole life, just listen until you hear someone say what you're feeling and realize you aren't alone. In healthcare and the military, we rely on teams. You need backup at home, too, and you don't need fancy emotional language to ask for it.

Families are constantly thrown into complex care with zero training, and the biggest mistakes I see are nodding through instructions you don't understand, relying on an exhausted memory, and waiting until you're completely burnt out to ask for help.

If I could teach every new caregiver just three core skills first, they’d be:

Good care usually looks like a boring, predictable routine. You don’t need to become a nurse. You just need a plan you understand, basic hands-on training, and backup when you hit your limit.

A lot of how I teach was shaped by the military where you might be teaching someone a complex weapon system or how to navigate the middle of nowhere with a map and compass. You break it down using simple language and without the expectation they have any prior knowledge or experience with the task. Those assumptions are how things get missed. “Baseline” means what’s usual for your person. “Transfer” might mean moving from bed to chair, but that word doesn’t teach you how. Nobody is born knowing this stuff, and common knowledge is only common if you’ve lived it or somebody has taught you. And caregivers are the historian who knows their person's everyday baseline, routines, and sees whether the plan actually works at home.

Your father is still your father when he needs help getting to the toilet. Your wife is still your wife when her day includes medications and personal care. It’s easy for the work to take over until every conversation becomes another instruction.

Both people are going through a change. You’re adjusting to being the caregiver, and your person may be struggling with needing help doing things they’ve done for themselves their whole life. Sometimes the frustration is about losing control, not about you.

Explain what you’re doing. Ask permission. Close the door. Keep them covered where you can. Offer choices and let them do the parts they can safely manage. Needing help shouldn’t mean losing every say in their own life.

And protect some time together that isn’t about care. Respect goes both ways. You’re allowed to say, “I can do this, but I need help with that.” Those boundaries help protect the relationship. Ultimately, the goal is quality of life for both of you. You should still want to hug your person and kiss ’em on the forehead at the end of the day.

Early burnout easily gets lost in the daily grind. You’re withdrawing and ignoring your own health, and before you know it, sheer exhaustion leads to mistakes. It builds slowly as tasks stack up until everything relies on you, and eventually, explaining the care to someone else feels like more work than just doing it yourself.

You have to get ruthlessly practical. Start by finding your biggest "Stress Point" that’s making the whole thing feel impossible, and focus on fixing that one variable first.

And we need to ditch generic self-care advice. Telling a drowning caregiver to take deep breaths or journal is useless when what they actually need is sleep and some time away from being responsible for another person. If you're asking for help, give people specific tasks like, "Can you cover Thursday afternoon?" or "Can you pick up the meds?" And if you don't have family or friends to lean on, be direct with the medical care team or social worker. Tell them plainly, "The current setup isn't working, and I need help finding real support." Love doesn’t give anyone unlimited capacity. Even machines break down. It’s simply not reasonable to expect one person to do it all alone.

No one is immune to burnout or compassion fatigue. I was being paid, had extensive training, a great job, and a great team, and I still got to go home for a shower and a nap. Yet I’d show up early and sit in my car until the last minute because I felt like I was going to snap. I took time off, but it was never enough to mentally recover. After 19 years, I couldn't stomach the thought of putting on scrubs or taking responsibility for another life with the constant weight of their safety and the dread of making a mistake. So I left. I started writing down what I’d learned in hopes of helping others, and six months later, I did put the scrubs back on.

Those parts of me came into the room whether I was wearing scrubs or not. I even spent a stretch doing home-health visits on a Harley. The grandmas thought it was funny.

My hobby of collecting hobbies has definitely helped me connect with people. There’s nearly always something we have in common. Maya Angelou put it beautifully in her poem “Human Family”: “We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.”

Humor can make an uncomfortable situation a little more human, and the same goes for creativity. Caregivers need that space, too. If everything that makes you yourself gets pushed aside indefinitely, eventually the role is all that’s left. There needs to be some life inside all this living.

You’re gonna screw up and make mistakes. And that’s okay. There’s a learning curve. Every medical professional and every family caregiver in your situation made mistakes while they were learning, too. Figure out what you need to get through today safely, for you and your person. If you don’t know how to do a task, say so before you’re home alone trying to work it out.

When you’re stressed and tired, keep it simple. At the end of the day, if you’re both clean, dry, and safe, and the necessary care is done, you did your duty. And know that if you aren’t doing this by choice and it just fell on you, it’s okay to feel whatever you’re feeling. The fact that you’re stepping up and taking care of someone other than yourself still counts, and is amazing.

Start with the person, the home, and the specific tasks causing trouble as the right equipment depends on all three. What works in one home might be useless in another, and as your loved one’s needs change, what worked last month might not work next month. You have to adjust, pivot, and adapt. Bathroom and mobility needs deserve attention early, but the most overlooked items are often the simplest: good lighting, clear walking paths, and placing everyday supplies within easy reach. The right equipment shouldn't just exist, it should solve a real problem and make daily care safer and more manageable for both of you.

And a physical binder can be one of the most useful tools in the house. Keep instructions, medications, routines, and contacts organized so you can find them when you’re stressed, in an emergency, and somebody else can step in when needed.