Joy Johnston is a digital journalist, author, and caregiver advocate based in Atlanta, Georgia. Her collection of personal essays on caregiving, titled The Reluctant Caregiver, received a gold medal at the 2018 Independent Publisher Book Awards. She also writes about dementia and caregiving on her blog, The Memories Project, which was honored as one of the “Best Alzheimer’s Disease Blogs of 2020” by eMediHealth, and she is a featured author on The Caregiver Space. An only child, she assisted her mother as a long-distance caregiver to her father with dementia for ten years. A few years after his passing, she left her career and home to move across country to care for her mother when she was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer. This was not a role she wished for as their relationship had always been challenging. In this episode we discuss the difficulties of managing your parents’ health care needs as an only child living hundreds of miles away, the shortcomings of rural health care, and why paid caregivers need recognition for the value they bring to family caregiving. Read Joy’s AlzAuthors Post: https://alzauthors.com/2016/09/21/meet-author-joy-johnston/ Start reading The Reluctant Caregiver now! https://amzn.to/38jsVZs Note: We are an Amazon Associate and may receive a small commission from book sales. Connect with Joy Johnston Website: http://joyjohnston.com/ Memories Project: https://memoriesproject.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheMemoriesProject/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/joymemories LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joyjohnstonatl/ Each season our podcast brings you six of our authors sharing their dementia journeys. Please subscribe so you don’t miss a word. If our authors’ stories move you please leave a review. And don’t forget to share our podcast with family and friends in need of knowledge, comfort, and support on their own dementia journeys. AlzAuthors is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization totally reliant on donations to do what we do. Your generosity will help cover our many operating costs, which include website hosting and maintenance fees, service charges to keep things running smoothly, and marketing expenses to promote our authors, expand our content, improve our reach, and more. Our ongoing work supports our mission to lift the silence and stigma of Alzheimer’s and other dementias. To sustain our efforts please visit https://alzauthors.com/donate/ . Thank you for listening.