|
Stories for Reprint
Your Partner Has Arthritis, So How Can You Help?
By Petya Stoeva, MARRTC Staff
Laura Dobozenski is a co-facilitator of an arthritis support group in St. Paul, Minn., where each month 10 men and women, ages 30 to 60, get together to talk about their lives. One issue that often comes up is the spouses' attitudes toward the disease.
"The number one thing that comes out that I have noticed is that the partner with arthritis is looking for the other one to be emotionally supportive and understand their daily challenges," Dobozenski says.
But understanding arthritis is not an easy task. The term arthritis includes more than 100 diseases, each with its own subset of symptoms, causes and complications. Two people with the same form of arthritis can have different degrees of pain, joint swelling and immobility and can carry vastly different lifestyles as a result of that. Furthermore, arthritis pain and stiffness vary during the day and from one day to another and those shifts are usually unpredictable. But the biggest problem for people with arthritis is that they often look healthy to others, even when they are under excruciating pain, and that makes communicating the disease to a healthy partner even more difficult.
So, what can you do if your partner has arthritis but you don't know how to help? The key is to educate yourself on your partner's exact condition. Go to the doctors' appointments, understand the medications and how they affect your spouse, follow the progression of the disease and know what to expect, consider joining a support group, either together with your spouse or separately.
Once you know about your partner's arthritis and all the physical aspects of the disease, start understanding its emotional side. People with arthritis often suffer from depression, low self-esteem and lack of sexual desire and those conditions may go unnoticed by the physician or the healthy partner for a long time. Talking intimately with your partner will help you assess their emotional state and how you can contribute to their well-being. And if the partner with arthritis seems to be defensive, rejects your help or is in denial, those are just other signs that there is a problem, which needs to be addressed. Keep in mind that your partner with arthritis goes through the same uncertainties and fear that you're going through and they're also reluctant to let go of the image of the healthy self that they once were.
Dr. Jackson Rainer, a psychologist in Valdosta, Ga., who counsels individuals and couples with a chronic disease, says that a partner of a person with arthritis can contribute to a healthy relationship by being open to change and receptive to the appreciation, the resentments and the regrets that both of them would feel. According to Rainer, the healthy partner needs to see the illness as a couple's problem, rather than being the other person's fault, and share the weight of the disease.
And while supportive partners are definitely appreciated, they can easily overdo it and go into the other extreme, which is to make the disease the center of a couple's life. "I don't want arthritis to be the focus of my life," says Alyssa Fox, 19, of Port Orchard, Wash., who has lived with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis since she was 13. "Arthritis is not who I am, it's just part of who I am. I don't want it to be the thing we talk about all the time. I don't want it to be the focus of our relationship ... I hate the question 'How are you feeling?' ... It's really hard to spend your entire life answering questions of how are you feeling, I get enough of that from my doctor. I prefer to deal with it from the start [of a relationship] and then forget about it."
Dobozenski has similar impressions from her support group, and according to her, people with arthritis "want to be treated as a partner in caring and compassion and in sharing and doing things together, to still be socially active, not to let go of what they used to do together."
"Your Partner Has Arthritis, So How Can You Help?" is the third story of the four-part series "Sexuality with Arthritis."
|
|
