When The Helper Bees first bought Dimensions, our CPO at the time, Eric Corum, and Director of Product, Ashley Noble, went to visit me in New Jersey. Eric had to use the bathroom, and when he came out he was hysterically laughing because my shower curtain was Blaze and the Monster Machines and Char’s shower curtain is the periodic table.

My first love was case management. I still do a little bit of it now, and I really feel that it’s important. A lot of times I’ll talk to families about support groups, and a lot of them feel guilty if they put their loved one in a facility, or even if they go out just for the day. And I say, "If you don’t take care of yourself, nobody will be here to take care of him. Have a caregiver, a friend, somebody come in for four hours, five hours, so you can go to the lake, look at the water, go to a movie, get lunch with one of your buddies, take a walk. Something!" I told one guy, “This is your homework: I’m going to call you next week, and I want you to tell me about the day and what you did.” And I did. I called him, and he was laughing, of course. He said having a fun day just relieved him. So that’s the part that I enjoy.

I have a story about my mom, but it isn't about caregiving. She was 73, and she got to the point where she was in constant pain. So you know, my sister and myself and my father were a small family, and I remember we all went out to eat, and just looking at her, she was so unhappy. I mean, she wasn’t the woman that I I knew. After dinner, I went over to her, and I gave her a big hug, and I said, “You can go.” And within a week, she was gone.

Well, I have to go back in time a little bit. Picture it, Brooklyn, after 1950. In my day, a Jewish girl growing up in Brooklyn, you didn’t make your decision of what you wanted to be. You went to college, you became a teacher, which I was before nursing. Then you get married, you have babies. Your husband’s going to take care of you for the rest of your life, you don’t have to work in the summer, and that’s what you do. So that’s what I did. It didn’t quite work out that way. I hated teaching. So then, when I got divorced, that’s when I had my son, and I had to go back to work, and it was like, no, I can’t. If it weren’t for my parents, I don’t know where I would be today. Because my father was a doctor, and education was like the number one thing in his life, after golf. And he said, “I will always pay for your education.” So I told my parents I have to go back to work, I hate teaching, I love science, And I want to be a nurse. Well, my father, being a doctor, he was thrilled that I was going to be a nurse. He thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. And so they paid for somebody to take care of the kids for me to go to school, and so like I said, if it wasn’t for them, I don’t know where I would be today.