Dr. Leon Banister, Jr.

Caregiving setbacks hit hard — especially when you don’t see them coming.

It was a Sunday.

We were all set to go to one of our favorite restaurants — Berry’s. We’d been planning it all week, looking forward to it like a big event. It was supposed to be smooth. Just a walk down the stairs, a ride to the spot, and a meal we both missed.

Yeah, sure — getting to the car was a little unfamiliar. We hadn’t done it in a while. But he’d been going down the stairs all week for appointments. We’d taken private transport, gone to doctor’s offices. No major issues. We were feeling good about this.

We were feeling hopeful.

But then — halfway down the stairs — it hit. The wobble. The hesitation. The weight-shifting. The sudden look in his eyes like he wasn’t sure where he was or what was happening.

And everything started to fall apart.

I looked at him — really looked — and something just felt off.

“Bro, you good?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yeah, I’m straight.”

But he didn’t look straight. He looked… unfamiliar. Like something had shifted behind his eyes. Like I was talking to him, but I wasn’t getting him.

“You sure?” I said again.

He nodded. But then he stopped walking. Hesitated. Looked at me again, confused — like he didn’t know where we were or why we were even doing this.

Angel was right there too, watching all this unfold. She saw it in real time — saw the same thing I was seeing. I remember her saying something like, “Yo, what’s going on?”

And all I could say was, “I don’t know.”

Because I didn’t. And that was the scariest part of all.

Was it another UTI brewing? Low oxygen? A blood sugar crash?
I was running through every possibility in my head — fast — but getting no answers. No signs. No clarity.
Just him, standing there, blinking, looking like a stranger.
And me, frozen — trying to hold both of us together while everything fell apart.

At that moment, we knew.

We had to pivot. The restaurant was off the table. Plans changed. Just like that. And that’s the thing about caregiving — this is the life. This is what it means to love someone through recovery.

Because recovery isn’t linear.

We’ve had to make peace with that truth more times than I can count.

There was that unexplained fall early on — the one no one could explain. No bruises, no break, just a quiet setback that knocked us off course.

Then came the real fall. The one that did damage. The one that confirmed everything we were afraid of. The one that fractured more than just a bone.

And the pattern kept showing up:
Every time we thought we were gaining ground, we stumbled backward.
Every time we started to feel sure, things got unsteady.

It’s like trying to find your footing in sand. Just when you think you're stable, the ground shifts — and you’re back to catching your breath again.

Along this journey, we started with what felt like a clear goal: recovery from a physical injury. A break. A fracture. Something you could point to on an X-ray and say, “That’s the problem.”

But when you’re caring for someone older, it’s rarely just physical.

What we’ve come to understand is that physical injuries in older adults often come with — or trigger — sudden cognitive shifts. Disorientation. Confusion. Memory loss. New behaviors that weren’t there before. And now you’re not just recovering from a fall — you’re recovering from what the fall did to the brain.

And that’s what makes this so uncertain. So unsteady.

What starts out simple — a hospital stay, a rehab plan — can quickly snowball into something more complex. It metastasizes into layers of recovery that no one warned you about. And had he been younger, maybe things wouldn’t have spiraled this way. But aging changes the equation. The stakes are higher. The outcomes less predictable.