How Has Your Illness Affected Your Relationships?
Photo by Jason Nicholls, Flickr
I’m part of a mother’s circle. We meet once a week and talk about our lives. This week, one woman who I’ll call Rachel broke down in tears and began explaining that she was having a particularly difficult time. She feels unappreciated and overworked at her job and guilty because it prevents her from spending time with her husband and her two young children since she commutes to the city and doesn’t get home until 8pm or later, after the kids are asleep.
The stress of her situation has been manifesting as bouts of vertigo, chronic stomach upset, insomnia, lightheadedness, anxiety, and fatigue (some of the body’s greatest hits for communicating we’re in resistance not flow, we’re going against our instincts and intuition and doing something that’s not a fit.)
“But there’s no room for me not to feel well,” she declared. “My husband’s cornered the market on that. He owns that entire territory.”
Her husband, who she’s been with for eight years, was just recently diagnosed with Lyme Disease, but he’s been suffering mysterious chronic symptoms since before they met, and they’ve spent well over $20,000 on medical bills for him.
“He’s sick all the time,” she said, “and I find myself getting angry and impatient with him and wishing there was some space in our relationship for me to not always be the strong healthy one. I feel awful about it because I know he’s really sick, he has something real that’s wrong with him, but I just wish sometimes that I could take a break. I wish I could be the one to say, ‘I’m not feeling well I need to stay home today.’ Or ‘Honey can you make dinner tonight I need to rest?’ But that’s his role.”
Disease vs. Illness
I listened to her tell her story with great interest, thinking that here was the difference between disease and illness. Disease is the set of clinical symptoms a person has. Illness, however, is the entire constellation of issues and feelings surrounding our disease. Illness is what happens when that set of symptoms belongs to a real person, who is part of a family and a workplace and a community. Doctors address disease, but rarely approach the effects of illness in our life and relationships.
So today I want to know what the biggest, most pressing issues are that come up for you in your life, in your relationships, as a result of your illness? Have they changed since you’ve received an “official” diagnosis? I want to know where the major areas of disruption and dissatisfaction are for you so that I can bring these topics and conflicts into the foreground and hopefully provide some insight as to how to resolve or at least better manage them.
Here, I’ll start. Though my health has stabilized significantly in the past two years, I’ve had my fair share of relationship issues that sprung from my illness, most of which were during my ten years of mystery sickness, before my diagnosis:
1. My best friend was convinced I just needed to drink a few beers and I’d be fine. She thought I was just being “dramatic” and maintained that position for several years.
2. My sister used to come into the city to hang out with me and I’d have to bail out at the last minute because my fatigue was so intense I couldn’t leave the apartment. In response, she would feel I was being selfish and/or I had some secret phobia that was controlling my life.
3. My ex-boyfriend used to get furious with me when I’d need to leave a party early. He had little patience for the limitations my severe diet restrictions placed on where we ate. I once missed his birthday party because I was in his bedroom sleeping all night. He only just recently confessed that he was still sorta angry about that.
4. My ex-husband, while we were dating, believed that I was depressed because I would say in the morning that I’d want to go out and then by the evening I’d say I didn’t have the energy. Years later, when we had already married and divorced and I was finally diagnosed, he apologized for that.
5. Many photographers in the NYC area would never hire me to assist them again because of how many times I canceled or left early because I was “sick” though there was no outer manifestation that they could see, like a cough or sneeze.
These are just a few of the more surface issues that came up for me in my relationships, though all of them point to deeper attitudes and beliefs about my sickness that – if I had had the awareness and communication skills I have now – I could have worked through with each person and established a much deeper rapport and a much more authentic support system.
What about you? What are the issues around your illness that most impact you and your relationships?
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