When Wendy Percoulis was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 33, she immediately stopped chatting with her partner, Dolly Miconi, about the tomatoes growing in their garden and where they'd take their next vacation. Instead, they talked mastectomies, and chemo appointments, and how they'd get by financially. "It put a humongous strain on us," says Percoulis.
Miconi accompanied Percoulis to all of her medical appointments and missed work to help her when chemo hit her hardest. She also took on all of the couple's day-to-day responsibilities. Percoulis battled depression and eventually had a nervous breakdown. Miconi struggled with her own moods, too.
"Once you have cancer, you change," says Percoulis. "Dolly was kind of mad that I wasn't the same person she'd met." But the two have worked through their difficulties and are now planning a trip together.
"Accept and adapt," may be the best advice for a couple confronted with a disparity. "In good relationships, people don't blame each other—'This is your fault, you should have quit smoking five years ago,'" says McCarthy. "They say, 'we can get through this one step at a time.'"
Dual Diagnosis
Almost every couple will face a medical crisis eventually. If you get the unlucky diagnosis, start by clarifying your needs, suggests Gina Artioli, 22, whose boyfriend of two years left her shortly after she got Hodgkin's lymphoma. "I didn't know how to tell him what I wanted, and he didn't know how to ask," she says.
Her brush with cancer changed her dating criteria. "I go out with friends and we see the college boys partying. I don't think they could handle my history," she says. Even when she did find a guy sensitive enough to deal with her past, their relationship got rocky when he bought a motorcycle. "I would not get on it," says Artioli. "I've had my life-threatening experience, and I don't need to have any more."
Catastrophes aren't any easier when they strike more established unions. Five days before his wedding, the man who fell in love with a fellow bar-and-diner lover, Mark Milroy, got chest pain and his arms went numb. "His symptoms were classic," says his wife, Kelly McMasters. They called paramedics, but skipped the trip to the hospital, convinced that it was nothing more than prenuptial panic. But five months later, doctors confirmed that Mark had had a heart attack—and was in the middle of a second. Emergency surgery ensued, followed by a drastic lifestyle change.
"We came home and pinned the nutritionist's recommendations to the fridge, and I started cooking for the first time in my life. It was the only way I felt I could help," says Kelly. "We eat almost every meal at home now."
Just as important as Kelly's wholesale lifestyle change to benefit her husband's well-being is her perspective. "We call it communal coping," says Rohrbaugh. "It's not his problem or her problem, it's our problem." Rohrbaugh has found that "we-talk" by a spouse predicted positive change in a patient's condition over the next six months.
Addressing the problem head-on can benefit the well spouse, too. Since swearing off cigarettes and replacing pizza and cheeseburgers with grilled vegetables and lean chicken, Kelly has lost weight and reduced her own chances of developing heart disease.
Making Good on Vows
Serious illness often turns one partner into a caregiver, and while many people describe this role as rewarding, it's also demanding—and dangerous to the caregiver's health. Depression is common. One study found that women who nursed an ill or disabled spouse for nine or more hours per week had a higher risk of coronary artery disease, probably because they were stressed by time constraints, financial burdens, and the difficulty of
seeing their loved ones suffer.
That's not even the worst of it. Caregiving spouses who experience strain have a 63 percent higher overall death risk, compared to non-caregiving controls. The risks can persist even after the loved one dies. It's not unusual for people in very close relationships to die within a short time of one another. "You see people developing cancer or chronic illness about 18 months after losing someone very significant," says Laura Young, who spent 10 years as a rehabilitation psychotherapist. She couldn't escape her knowledge when she met Michael, a charming quadriplegic man, 18 years ago.
"We had an instant crush," she says. The two flirted and became close friends, but Young went on to marry another man. "One day, Michael and I discussed why he hadn't wheeled me off my feet when he had the chance. I realized he had made the decision to spare me the intensity of his needs. I don't think I could have handled it," she confesses. "It would have been extremely easy for me to fall into the caregiver role and not even realize I had let my life be subsumed by someone else's needs."
Of course, already committed couples don't have the same choice. "There's a lot of very difficult territory to negotiate when one spouse gets ill or injured," says Young. "The healthy spouse must figure out, 'To what degree am I obligated to adopt your disability?'" Open communication, allowing for psychological adjustment, and a sense of humor are critical.
Just ask Kelly McMasters—the ex-smoker and cheese-eater whose husband suffered his second heart attack months after their wedding. "If you had asked me before this went down, I would have said I didn't have a caretaking bone in my body," she says. "The last time my parents visited us, they stared at me as if I were an alien child: 'When did you learn to cook?!'"
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