Five years ago Judy Baum was semi-retired and enjoying life when out of nowhere came a curveball.

Her 38-year-old daughter, Lori Correia, suffered a massive stroke. Mrs Baum stepped in as her caregiver.

“You don’t expect your children to have a terrible thing like that happen,” said the mother of three.

Ms Correia had just had her office hours in Bermuda reduced. She was worried about how she would pay for her diabetes medicine and blood pressure pills.

“She had to pay for the medications and they would reimburse her later but she didn’t have the money and I think, the state she was in, she’d forget to take her medications as well,” Mrs Baum said.

“She had the stroke in October 2010; they didn’t find her for 24 hours. When you don’t see the doctor right away the stroke takes a hold of you.”

By the time she received medical help, Ms Correia was paralysed on her left side and her brain was not fully functioning.

The experience also “drastically” changed her life, Mrs Baum said.

The 63-year-old, who moved to Pennsylvania in 2009, is now back to work full-time. Her daughter has moved to the US to live with her and Mrs Baum is completely responsible for her care — everything from getting her showered and dressed to helping her eat meals.

“It’s no longer just my husband and me,” she said. “I now have to take care of Lori, so our finances have gone up.

“I had to pay off all her debts in Bermuda before she left, including anything her insurance didn’t cover. I also have to keep up with her medications; she takes about ten different medications a day.

“It’s also hard on me physically. I have to drive her back and forth to doctors’ visits and even just in terms of picking her up and taking her to the bathroom, it’s very taxing on the body. She’s almost like deadweight. It’s very hard to change an adult’s brief.”

Mrs Baum recently penned ‘The Caregiver Within’ under the name Amy McLeary.

She talks candidly about her experience caring for her daughter in the book. Her hope is to help others find the strength to persevere.

“Early on in my journey I went to the bookstore to try to find something on how to deal with my emotions and my daughter’s emotions while we were going through this and there was nothing,” she said.

“There were a lot of medical books on what happens when someone has a stroke and what the patient has to do to get better, but there wasn’t anything offering day-to-day information for the caregiver on how to deal with it and handle it, so I decided to write something myself.”

She often questioned her ability to write.

“I kept starting and stopping,” she said. “It took me about five years in total to do the book completely. I kept thinking, ‘I don’t know how to write a book, I must be out of my mind’.”

A publisher at Hay House Publishing had a read and convinced her not to stop.

“She got back to me and said, ‘Continue with it. I think it’s going to be good’.”

Mrs Baum finished writing in May. The book was released in July by Balboa Press, a smaller division of Hay House.

“It tells you about how everything that happened from the time that Lori had the stroke that day all the way up until the beginning of this year, what I did in those instances,” she said.

“I had to relive a lot of devastating things; times when I had to sit there and watch my child be so sick and I was helpless.

“In that situation you can’t do anything. You just sit there. She was screaming, she had to go through all these tests, and you have to hold her and watch her in pain. You wish it was you instead of her and it never gets easier. It just seemed to get worse.”

Mrs Baum wakes at 5am every day. An hour later, she starts getting Lori ready.

“I work full-time, but my boss is very kind and lets me go home and change Lori all the time.

“It is tough, but my advice to anyone else would be to not give up.

“Don’t just give up and leave your mother or child or wife or husband in a home. You’d be surprised at what you can do. Allow the help of the Spirit, too, because without God I couldn’t have done anything.” Mrs Baum said she was extremely proud of her book. She reads it whenever she needs extra strength.

“This experience, this struggle has enabled me to write a book, to realise so many things about myself and about Lori and about life as a caregiver,” she said.

• ‘The Caregiver Within’ is available at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble for $12.99.