125 Years of Showing Up

The number is 125. Well over it, actually — but 125 is where the math lands when you add up the caregiving years carried by the eight women who make up the Trained Loving Care team.

It doesn’t look like much on paper. It never does.

What it looks like in practice is Jacquelin Fields — who has been caregiving for over 52 years — walking into a difficult care situation and knowing exactly what to do. It looks like Tonia Axelson, who founded TLC and has spent 31 years in this work, still going home at the end of a shift and taking care of the people around her, because that is simply who she is. It looks like Makina Wadkins, 21 years old and two years into a career she already knows was made for her.

This team spans more than three decades of age difference and more than half a century of accumulated experience. That is not an accident. It is what Tonia built.

What accumulates

There is a kind of knowledge that cannot be taught and will not transfer through a certificate. It lives in the hands that have bathed someone who was embarrassed. In the patience of a person who has learned to sit with anger that was never really about her. In the instinct that knows when someone needs quiet and when they need to be heard.

Nancy Silveria, who has been caregiving for nine years, describes her work as being someone’s hands, their mind, their eyes — whatever they need her to be in the moment. That is not a task list. It is an orientation that takes years to earn and means everything to the person receiving it.

Tina D. Sooter came to TLC with 15 years of caregiving experience and a decade of running her own caregiving business. She could have stayed solo. She chose to be part of something larger.

When a new client arrives with a difficult care plan, Tonia knows who to call: Jacquelin. Her clients love her. So do her coworkers. That is what 52 years looks like up close.

Sisters and daughters and mothers

That is what Trained Loving Care says about who they are: sisters and daughters and mothers. Not a tagline — a literal truth about the women on this team, who between them have raised children, loved grandchildren, navigated marriages, and still chose to show up the next morning for someone else’s family.

This shapes everything about how they care. Not because personal experience automatically transfers to professional skill — it doesn’t. But because a woman who knows what it is to need help, and what it is to give it, brings a different quality of attention into a room. The care is not performed. It is the actual orientation of people who chose this work on purpose and keep choosing it.

Makina Wadkins is 21. She has been caregiving for two years, and the thing she loves most about it is helping someone stay in their home — surrounded by their things — and getting to see them smile. That is not a trained answer. That is someone who already understands what this work is for.

Alejandra Medina — known to her clients as Lexie — talks about caregiving as the steady work of building trust through patience and attention to detail. The small, consistent acts that make a person feel comfortable, supported, and valued. She has 2.5 years of experience. She already has the vocabulary of someone who has been doing it much longer.

Miah Maddox is 30. She has been caregiving for just over a year, and the best part of the work, she says, is giving someone independence — seeing them smile because they can still stay in their home, with their things around them, living their life.

What showing up actually means

It means arriving. Reliably. Even when the care plan is hard. Even when the person you’re caring for is frightened or confused or in pain and that fear comes out sideways.

It means, as Nancy Silveria puts it, closing your mouth and listening — really listening — because if you do, you can learn a lot from people’s experiences. Not just the care plan. The actual person.

It means the smallest improvements to a day: companionship, a meal that matters to someone, a walk, the presence of a person who is genuinely glad to be there. Donna, who has been a caregiver for over 15 years, says it simply: it brings a smile to her face to see that she’s made someone’s day easier and happier.

And then she closes her professional biography with four words earned across 15 years of sitting with people in their hardest moments. Not a platitude. A commitment: Never lose Hope.

Tonia Axelson founded Trained Loving Care because she believed that in-home, non-medical caregiving — real caregiving, the kind that sees a whole person and not just a care plan — deserved a team built with intention. Small and meaningful, she calls it. The kind of team where people know each other and know their clients.

What you get when you call TLC is not a staffing match. It is Tonia, Jacquelin, Tina, Nancy, Lexie, Makina, Miah, and Donna — eight women who between them have spent the better part of a century and a half learning what it means to show up. For strangers who became people they genuinely love. In homes that smelled like someone else’s life. During hours when it mattered most.

125 years of showing up. And counting.

Get to know the team. It starts with a conversation.

Trained Loving Care serves Washoe, Carson City, Minden, Gardnerville, and surrounding areas.