Thanksgiving Thoughts

I used to adore Thanksgiving. But not for the expected reasons - great food, big crowd, football games. I adored it because the power of these stimulants - gluttony, big crowd, football - enfolded my family in a cozy blanket of numbness. The numbness was dense enough to defeat the usual squabbles and snipings. And it allowed us to believe, for half a day, that we were indeed normal, even happy.

As a child, at some point during the endless feeding, I would slip off my chair and drop into the world under the table. Under the veil of the starched white table cloth, I could only see legs and shoes. The upside world of manufactured cheer was muted; and down below I had some quiet authenticity and some control.

Every year, in my down below, I untied my relatives shoelaces. I then retied one person's shoelaces to those of the person sitting in the adjacent seat. I did this with care and concentration. And every year, my relatives laughed as if this were a joke.

I knew it wasn't a joke, but it took me years of adulthood to figure out why I did this untying and retying. It's simple really, I was creating a unified family. One that had genuine bonds of untainted love.

This year, I do have genuine bonds of untainted love. With my life and love partner, Richard. With my brother and his family. With my friends. With my recently deceased father and with my self-involved mother. In some part I have illness and pain to thank. They pushed me to the edge and left me with no hope. In the place of no hope, in the down-below, I found something that tied me to life.

Am I grateful for illness and pain. Hell no! But I am grateful for the new meanings I discovered and for the love knots I learned to re-tie.

Grand Rounds is Up

at How to Cope with Pain. This is a very important blog for pain sufferers - full of useful info. Check out this weeks Grand Rounds - a collection of the week's best health care blog posts.

A Good Laugh: Peter Sellers & the Beatles

Do you just need a good laugh? Sometimes, we need to escape from the strains of illness and the work of relationship. Call your partner into the room and invite him or her to watch this clip with you. It's Peter Sellers, the brilliant actor/comedian (you may remember him from the Pink Panther movies or Being There), in the character of Shakespeare's Richard III, reciting the lyrics from the Beatles' It's Been a Hard Day's Night.

Enjoy, and feel all right. (And if this doesn't make you laugh, let me know and I'll post another crack-up clip of a chicken dancing).

Why Men Leave Ill Partners

Excerpts from an article in the 10/15/09 Times Online

Until her sickness do us part: why men leave ill partners

Men are seven times more likely than women to leave a seriously ill partner, a study has found. So why are males less able to cope?

According to the Office for National Statistics, there were 144,220 divorces in the UK in 2006-07 (the latest figures available) and, of those, about 18 per cent (25,959) were due to “family strain”, a term that includes serious illness. In the US, a survey by the National Centre for Health Statistics found that 75 per cent of first marriages end in divorce if one of the partners develops a terminal or chronic illness.

Although it is not stated in these divorces which partner was ill, a study published last month in the journal Cancer found that a man is seven times more likely to leave than his wife if the other becomes seriously ill.

What causes this apparent chasm in emotional coping mechanisms between the sexes is intriguing experts, and the theories are plentiful.

Indeed, a study in the Journal of Oncology last year reported that spouses were lonelier than their ill partners and had lower levels of wellbeing and marital satisfaction. There is an immediate shift in a relationship when an illness is diagnosed. You stop being partners as you knew it and move to being patient and carer. That can lead to feelings of fear, not just about the disease, but about the relationship and the well partner’s ability to cope. Feelings of anger and resentment about life and the situation can quickly arise.

A few researchers have suggested that men are more likely to walk out on a wife whose condition is newly diagnosed because the illness is more than they bargained for when they married.

There are suggestions, too, that traditional roles shift more significantly when a woman becomes ill. Men may still be working full time, but may have to cope with additional tasks such as ferrying their wife to appointments, arranging childcare, cleaning and doing household duties.

What a women wants most of all when she is ill is not so much for her husband to take charge, but for him to listen to her feelings and to express his own more often. Men have an urge to ‘fix’ things. They want to get in there and make it better when what they really need to do is shut up and listen. Even if you have heard it one hundred times before, your wife needs you to respond by saying that whatever happens, you are there for her.

For some people, illness proves a positive factor in bringing a couple closer together. One recent study at the University of Quebec found that 42 per cent of couples thought that the experience of breast cancer had strengthened their partnership. Accepting the changes that take place is a process that takes time and effort. But many people do find their love grows stronger as a result.