A Heartfelt Story of Love, Caregiving, and Recovery

On this Living to 100 Club podcast, we hear a love story from our guest, Sarah Cart. Sarah shares the journey of her husband’s acute medical illness and serious decline during Covid. In this conversation, she shares the toll it took on her and her entire family. These include her husband's kidney failure, hip fracture, and congestive heart failure to a heart transplant, cardiac rehabilitation and recovery from painkillers. Throughout all, Sarah’s husband, Ben, experienced an onslaught of hospitalizations, surgeries, and near-death experiences. Sarah recounts this journey in her new book, On My Way Back to You: One Couple’s Journey through Catastrophic Illness to Healing and Hope. This is truly a love story. We discuss our guest’s unexpected role as caregiver and her struggles with Covid lockdowns during the hospitalizations. She describes her learning the challenges of home health, and other trying episodes. We also hear about the upsides to this struggle. This includes the favorable responses to the medical care Ben had, and the positive lessons she can share about caring for other caregivers. Mini Bio SARAH CART was raised and educated in New York and New England and wrote for multiple local publications while she and her husband, Ben, raised four sons in northeastern Ohio. Upon becoming empty nesters, the two moved to the Florida Keys. They returned every summer to the Pennsylvania Poconos, where each had lifelong family connections. Then came COVID-19. The pandemic, combined with Ben’s health issues, necessitated their sheltering in place in Florida for the entirety of 2020. In the wake of Ben’s undergoing miraculous lifesaving measures, they have been afforded the unanticipated gift of a future and, more than ever before, relish time spent with family and friends. Sarah's Book On My Way Back to You: One Couple’s Journey through Catastrophic Illness to Healing and Hope