During the last five or six years, as my elderly parents were overtaken by illness and disease, our roles reversed from when I was a child. I became their caretaker, which included navigating our health care system.
My parents had a host of ailments, but principally for my mother, a 50-year smoker, it was a chronic, progressive lung disease. For my father, it was Lewy body dementia, which shares some symptoms with Parkinson’s disease, such as tremors and problems with walking or balance.