I'm constantly looking for info on how Lyle and my family may feel or think. I get so self-absorbed. I need to think about others.

"One of the important things we need to consider is our relationships. When we get an illness, everyone is affected -- all of our contacts, our friends, sometimes the people at our workplace, and certainly our kids and our spouse. People have described marriage as a dance. When your spouse takes a step in one direction, you have to take a step in the same direction or it doesn't work. You fall over or trip or stumble. With a chronic illness, oftentimes you will be here and the other person will be there. Your family and friends may need help, too, going through the same stages that we do. There's something I like to have my patients do when they come in with their spouses. Many of my patients are women and they bring their husbands. You know, we men have our own ways of dealing with things. We don't necessarily think about problems, we just try to fix or solve them. That's what we think we're designed to do. So the biggest frustration for most of us men is that we can't fix it. Our spouse has an illness that we can't fix.

So I ask the well spouses to try to visualize it a little differently. Think of it as aging, not illness. You can't fix aging. We are all aging and we all deal with it. One of the strongest supports we have through life is that our spouse or children or friends help us as we get older because everyone knows you can't fix aging. The same thing is true with a chronic illness. In most situations, your spouses can't fix it. We're not the way we used to be. But it's something we can try to accept even though it can't be fixed.

Chronic illness changes us and often our spouse has to change as well. Visualizations like the one above can help us get around some of our emotional baggage. We need to work through these things so we can deal with them. Unless we do that, we won't come out where we want to be -- which is on the other side."

~Cody K. Wasner, M.D., writer and a rheumatologist in private practice in Eugene, Oregon.