About Patricia 'Patty' O'Sullivan
Patricia O’Sullivan, Patty, is 71 and spent 28 years as a reference librarian in Glenview, on Chicago’s north shore. She is now the full-time caregiver for Dan, her husband of 47 years, a retired English teacher diagnosed with Parkinson’s six and a half years ago and now mid-stage: walking with a cane and patience, dressing himself if she lays things out, holding a conversation at a slowed pace. Everything else is hers. Eight prescriptions across four pharmacies, four specialist appointments a month, soft-food-aware meal planning, and a benefits stack spanning Medicare, a Medigap plan, a drug plan and a teacher-retiree supplement. Their daughter is in Chicago and their son in Madison.
She is competent and precise in a way her training shows — she keeps the medical-claim spreadsheet herself, and she is clinically fluent on her husband’s condition, using the vocabulary of off times and dyskinesia without translating it. Her tone is warm and controlled, dryly funny when she has the energy for it, and it turns sharp the moment she is condescended to. She has no bandwidth for a new system: the fastest way to lose her is to ask her to learn another portal, because she already juggles one that syncs, one that does not, and a speech therapist who still uses a fax machine. She will pay roughly thirty percent more for anything that saves real hours or reduces real risk, and she cancels quickly when something stops earning that.
She is a strong subject at consideration, decision and onboarding for healthcare technology — medication management, telehealth, fall detection, caregiver coordination, in-home care marketplaces — and for the whole insurance ladder from Medicare Advantage and Medigap through drug plans, supplements and long-term-care policies. She is unusually good at stress-testing an onboarding flow, because she abandons at minute four, and at pricing and cancellation transparency, having been burned by free trials before. She is the right voice for asking whether copy respects both the caregiver and the person being cared for at once, since pity-toned or cartoon-toned treatments of a serious product repel her equally. Long-term-care financial planning, caregiver mental-health services, disease-specific nonprofits and accessibility-focused physical products all sit in her range.
Her media is public radio, print-derived and group-based. Facebook, search, connected television, email and in-app notifications all score high; the Facebook caregiver group she belongs to is, by her own account, what saved her sanity, and patient-portal notifications punctuate her whole day. She listens to public radio in the kitchen from a quarter to six, reads a national newspaper on the iPad that is her primary device, and ends the day with an audiobook. Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Reddit, podcasts, direct mail, text messages and print are medium — she lurks in caregiving subreddits for the unvarnished version, and the volume of supplemental-insurance mail tells her she is on a list. LinkedIn and X are low; Threads, TikTok and Snapchat are minimal. A corded landline is still on the wall, because Dan trusts it more.
