Breaking News from the PR Department

“It’s a calling,” declares the press release in my email inbox.

Ask anyone who works in the healthcare profession and they will likely tell you that their work is born from a desire to help people, to nurture the sick, to heal the ailing. Caregiving is not for the faint of heart; it’s grueling, dirty, all-guts-little-glory work. The hours are long, the days are hard, and the mental and physical strain are tough on the human body.

And the solution? As the press release’s headline explains, it’s:

Taking Care of YOU: Five Ways that Caregivers Can Stay Healthy and Bypass the Pitfalls (Power Naps Included!)

You can read all about it a new book, the author of which, we’re told, “believes that she has been preparing to write” this book “for most of her life”—since “As a child, she was a better than average student. She wrote dramatic poetry. Before college, she worked at a newspaper.

“”As a child, she was a better than average student.” Not that the topic is unworthy, and not that the book—which I haven’t read—is bad, but am I alone in finding something terribly sad in that self-description?