I'm Using AI to Survive a Family Health Emergency

For close to a month now, I've come to this hospital almost every day. This past week, my aunt's closest sister and I started splitting round-the-clock shifts, so nearly all of my time these days happens at my aunt's bedside.

She's not just an aunt to me. My mother died when I was three and my sister was one, and my father raised us alone from there. My aunt was there for holidays, for every performance and life event, for weekends and summers - a steady presence through everyday life, all along. She retired and moved in with us for a few years when my own kids were born, one more example of how present she's always been. She's been woven into our lives our entire lives, and still is, which is why this is hitting so hard.

She got a kidney transplant almost twenty years ago. This past month, she went in for major surgery to get ready for a second one. There've been stretches during it where it looked like she might not pull through. As of today, she's back on a steady road to recovery, and that's why I have the time and composure to write this. As I write, she's sleeping peacefully for the first time in almost a month.

Some of these have been among the hardest weeks of my life. Literally - I'm closing in on fifty, and nobody gets there without a fair number of hard weeks already behind them. This is up with the worst of them. Showing up almost every day for a month, then around the clock for a week, while still trying to keep track of everything else in my life, has taken more out of me than I expected it to.

In a lot of ways, AI is a tool like email or a phone, something people turn to for almost everything. But it can help in ways, and at a level of productivity, that nothing before it could. I think it's the best tool we've ever had for managing a situation like this, and it's been serving me every day, which is why I'm writing about it. This is right in the crosshairs of the ways AI can help. To me, those uses seem to be increasingly outweighing the concerning ones, which I still haven't seen show up and don't really expect to.

Even with it, I'm barely keeping up. It hasn't made a hard month easy. It's kept the logistics from becoming their own separate problem on top of the one already in progress - the bedside, updates to family and friends, a string of flights that kept changing, getting my aunt's affairs in order, and a calendar that was already overflowing before any of this started.

The Bedside

The bedside turned into a blur of machines, numbers, and alarms almost immediately, and none of it came with an instruction manual. I don't trust AI to give medical advice, and I never asked it to diagnose anything. I used it to understand what I was looking at. It helped me ask the care team better questions, and it helped me calm down about the alarms and numbers that weren't a concern, so I could save my worry for the ones that were.

When her breathing rate climbed to a number I didn't recognize, I asked what could cause it and when it would need a nurse. When the medical team explained something, I'd run it by AI afterward to make sure I understood it. Every time, what they told us checked out.

None of that replaced them. It made me a more educated caregiver, and a more helpful one - for my aunt, and for the staff taking care of her. I could walk into a conversation with a nurse already understanding the question I was asking, instead of showing up scared and vague and needing to be calmed down first.

Updates to Family and Friends

For weeks now, I've been sending daily, sometimes twice-daily, updates over text to a growing list of family and friends. Every one of them has to share the details concisely, accurately, and transparently, and strike the ideal tone between realism and optimism. Each time, I'd tell AI the update the way it came out of me, long and sometimes rambling, and it would help me draft it into something tight I could text to everyone.

The Flights

Four times this past month, I needed a flight booked or changed, each time on short notice. My aunt's closest sister lives in South Carolina, and the first booking was her flight up, originally for October. When things took a bad turn, that flight had to move up to the next day. Then, with her already at the airport, we found we'd gotten her name wrong on the ticket. It was too late to fix, so the original had to be cancelled and a new flight booked while she waited there. Not long after, I booked a flight to bring my sister in.

Each time, I logged into the Delta site and AI did the rest. It searched the flights, laid out the options, and once I picked one, it filled everything in and took me all the way to the checkout confirmation screen. All I had to do was check it and confirm. That included the rebooking at the airport. Price didn't matter at that point. What mattered was that she could get on that flight, and she did.

Getting Her Affairs in Order

We've always hoped for the best, and it seems our prayers have been answered, for the moment. But in the darker moments, we started preparing for the worst, and we quickly found out my aunt's affairs weren't in order. We had to work out what her wishes were, forensically and from her directly. That was hard for her, but she gave us her permission and cooperated throughout. Then there was a lot of hunting for paperwork, and finding it in various states of completeness. We had to start getting access to her passwords. We engaged our attorney and put together some preliminary material for him. And we had to set up secure places for my sister and me to store and share all of it.

Thankfully, it looks like we won't need any of it. But just in starting to sort through it, AI was tremendously helpful. One day, hopefully many, many years from now, it may be again.

My Own Calendar

The timing made all of this worse. Days before my aunt went in, I'd announced I was leaving my job, and the response was the kind you hope for: calls, meetups, and reconnections stacking up faster than I could answer them. Then the hospital happened, and the two collided. Over four days, AI helped me cancel or reschedule around fifteen calls, lunches, a conference, a standing weekly commitment, and my own doctor's appointment, each note written in my own words, honest about why. It blocked every open hour on my calendar for two weeks so nothing new could land, turned off my public booking page and put up a notice about a family emergency, and built a running list of who I still owe a reply or a reschedule. I'm behind on all of it. The list just makes sure I know exactly how behind, and to whom.

The Overhead Around Her Care

There are our priorities, and then there's the tactical work it takes to make them happen. Right now the priority is my aunt's care, and supporting everyone invested in that sacred mission. The tactical work is a means to that end, and in a situation like this, it's all overhead and downside. It's tedious, hard, and time-sensitive. It demands accuracy, and it's overwhelming. Under a heavy load and on little sleep, it's easy to forget things and make mistakes. There are a lot of moving parts that need to be prioritized and sequenced right, and a ton of communication.

That's the work AI has been helping me with.