The fluorescent hum is the only thing that’s clear. It’s a low, insistent buzz that seems to vibrate right behind your eyeballs. The doctor is talking-a good doctor, a kind one-but his words are turning into acoustic soup. Titration. QID. Contraindications. You’re nodding, because nodding is the universal sign for ‘I am competent and in control,’ even when you’re mentally drowning. Your pen is scratching against the back of a pharmacy receipt, the only paper you could find. You write down ‘lower dose if dizzy’ but miss the part about *which* of the 9 medications he’s talking about.
He claps his hands together. “Any questions?” And the most honest answer, the one clawing its way up your throat, is ‘Can you start over? Every single word? And maybe say it into a recorder this time?’ But you don’t. You smile. You say, “Nope, that all makes sense.” You are a liar. But you’re a liar for a noble cause: to get your mom, who is looking frail under these terrible lights, out of this beige room and back home.
The System, Not You
We tell ourselves the problem is our memory. We scold ourselves for not paying better attention, for not bringing a proper notebook, for not being smarter or more organized. The whole world of advice boils down to ‘try harder.’ It’s a personal failing. But what if that’s completely wrong? What if the system is asking your brain to do something it was never designed for, especially not under duress? Your brain isn’t a hard drive, meticulously saving files in neat folders. Under the stress of a loved one’s health crisis, it’s a whiteboard in an earthquake.
Just last month, I permanently deleted three years of photos from my cloud backup. It was an accident born from a poorly designed user interface and a moment of inattention. One confirmation click-a click I swear I was making for a different reason-and an entire era of my life vanished. My son’s first steps. A final trip with my grandfather. All gone. I spent $239 on a data recovery service that sent back a polite email essentially saying, ‘We’re sorry for your loss.’ The emptiness in my stomach was profound. It wasn’t just the loss of pixels; it was the horrifying realization of how fragile our modern methods of record-keeping are. We place absolute faith in systems that can be annihilated with a single, mindless tap.
And it made me think. We have outsourced every trivial memory. My grocery list lives on my phone. My appointments are in a calendar that yells at me 19 minutes before I have to leave. We don’t even memorize phone numbers anymore. Yet, for the most critical data imaginable-how to administer a medication that could either save a life or end it-we default back to our most primitive, emotional, and unreliable storage medium: the human brain.
I used to take driving lessons from a man named Phoenix S.K. He was a retired aeronautical engineer, and he taught driving with a terrifying level of precision. He once failed a student for holding the steering wheel at 10-and-2 instead of 9-and-3. He was a stickler for the rules. I remember complaining to him that I couldn’t possibly watch my speed, check my mirrors, listen for his instructions, and navigate an unfamiliar intersection all at once. He tapped the dashboard. “Your brain has a very limited amount of processing power,” he said, not unkindly. “Right now, all of it needs to be dedicated to the physical act of driving the car and observing immediate threats. You use it for that. You use the speedometer for your speed. You use the GPS for directions. Don’t ask your brain to do the GPS’s job. It’s stupid.”
In that exam room, your job is to be present, to comfort your mother, to ask clarifying questions, to hold her response hand. Your job is not to be a court stenographer, capturing a verbatim transcript while your heart is pounding. The expectation that we can flawlessly perform both roles is absurd. It’s like criticizing someone for not composing a symphony while simultaneously landing a plane. The cognitive load is too high. The stakes are too high. Things get missed. And when the thing that gets missed is the interaction between a blood thinner and an antibiotic, the consequences are catastrophic.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit I criticize our slavish devotion to technology and then turn around and can’t remember what I walked into a room to get without checking a note on my phone. It’s a contradiction I live with. We live in a world where we expect seamless digital perfection but haven’t applied that expectation to our most vital conversations.
I’ll never get those photos back. The finality of that digital loss is a constant, low-grade ache. There’s a ghost on my hard drive where three years of memories should be. And for weeks, I was furious with myself. How could I have been so careless? I should have had a backup of the backup. I should have been more careful. It was my fault. It’s the same shame-spiral so many caregivers feel when they can’t remember if a pill should be taken with food or on an empty stomach. They blame themselves, their ‘bad memory,’ their lack of focus.
Acknowledging Human Fallibility
Phoenix S.K. would have said we’re using the wrong tool for the job. You wouldn’t use a wrench to hammer a nail. So why are we using our memory-a beautiful, creative, emotional, and profoundly distractible tool-to do the job of a high-fidelity recording device? We’ve accepted our brain’s limitations in almost every other high-stakes field. Pilots have checklists. Surgeons have checklists. We don’t expect them to just ‘remember everything.’ The act of caregiving is a high-stakes field. It’s time we started treating it that way, not by demanding caregivers have superhuman memories, but by giving them the tools that acknowledge they are beautifully, fallibly human.