How Do You Write When a Medical Crisis Hits?
“My mother? A stroke? How can this be?”
These thoughts flew through the mind of my friend after her mom’s collapse and hospitalization. But they were only the beginning of the worries.
“Will she recover? Can she ever go home? How can I help her? How can I keep working?”
As pragmatic as that last thought might seem, it’s just as important a question as all the rest. When caring for elderly parents becomes an unexpected necessity, it’s crucial to think through all the different areas of life impacted, including work issues. Especially if you are the sole breadwinner.
There will be plenty of interruptions in dealing with the doctors, nurses, hospitalization, and caregiving, but those of us already caring for elderly parents, raising children, and even babysitting grandchildren have learned to be creative in how we fit in writing time. Now’s the time to pull out all the tools for productivity.
Carry the Tools Necessary to Write
It’s wise to always have a shorthand notebook and pen with you, along with a Smartphone. (I recommend the iPhone – there are so many useful apps to help writers and caregivers.) With those, you’re well prepared for the most unexpected of interruptions. If you have a netbook or laptop readily available, so much the better. With these three items, you’ll be prepared to work in whatever bits and pieces of time you can find. And as I’ve learned from caregiving experience over the years, when it comes to hospitals there is often a lot of “hurry up and wait.”
Of course, while the immediate crisis is going on, you may be too worried to work. If circumstances allow, the best thing to do is notify essential personnel and just focus on your parent and their needs. Then again, depending on what you write about, you’re likely to find different writing ideas cropping up in your mind as you observe all that’s going on. If so, just jot them down so you don’t forget them. Later, when things are a bit calmer and you have the time, those notes can turn into a blog post, article or book idea. Or maybe just a way for you to deal with the crisis at hand.
Using a flash drive is handy when you’re working between computers and don’t have internet service or you can use Evernote or another hosting services that uses “cloud computing” to enable users to store and share files and folders online.
Dropbox offers this service free for the first 2 GB of data, but I’m cautious about using them and never do so for confidential items. If you are writing for a client or editor who uses the same service, you could type the article at the hospital on your laptop while your parent is resting, save it into the Dropbox folder that you share with that client, and they’ll be able to easily access it without ever knowing you were working from the hospital. Just don’t forget to save constantly. Also, make sure you have backups of essential documents in other places so you have more than one copy if you lose files.
Though no one ever plans for a medical emergency, these simple tips and tools can enable a writer…interrupted to keep on writing, even when a crisis hits hard.
