No matter what your partner has that requires a caregiver many of things that a partner caregiver goes through are the same. Every caregiver has feelings of frustration and even helplessness sometimes. Many partner caregivers have had to go through problems with a nurse or doctor that won’t treat them as a family member of the patient. Finally every caregiver has to figure out how to balance caregiving and being a partner. Fortunately these similarities can be good place to start when talking to other caregivers about your experiences.

Caregiving Feelings

I would be surprised if anyone’s goal in life was to have a partner that needed caregiving. Watching your partner fight something that will eventually kill them or that causes them to be in pain all the time is hard. It is easy to feel helpless when you just want to take it all away for your partner but all you can do is hold their hand and watch. It is easy to get frustrated when the medicines aren’t working or, even worse, the medicine is causing problems in other areas. These are just two of many common feelings that partner caregivers share.

Prejudice Towards Partner Caregivers

One of the worst things that a partner caregiver can go through is to not be treated as family by doctors and nurses. When your partner trusts you to be their caregiver then the doctors and nurses should respect that but not all do. This isn’t just a problem for caregivers. Most of LGBT community has to worry that they won’t be allowed to speak for their partner if something was to go wrong. There are quite a few people in the medical profession that won’t count partners as family and don’t want to talk to them.

My Personal Caregiving Experience

I often resented the times when I had to say that I was Dee’s caregiver just to get her medicines. If Dee was with me she usually pointed out that I was also her wife. I wasn’t just her caregiver; I had been her wife years before I became her caregiver (thanks to a little Vegas wedding). I was so proud of her strength and courage that she displayed while she was fighting her battle with a rare cancer. I just wanted to shout from the rooftops that this awesome woman was my wife but sometimes I had to hide it just to get her the things she needed with the least resistance. Talk about frustrating!
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We were luckier than many couples. The Nurse Practitioner that we saw for years never once questioned us going to our yearly appointments together and always answered any of our questions. Dee’s cancer doctor never once ignored my questions and understood that my answers to his questions where from the both of us. Of course once Dee filled out her Power of Attorney for medical decisions he didn’t have to worry about getting in trouble with his bosses. Still there were nurses in the cancer center that had issues with me answering questions about Dee’s care and medication and they would act like I wasn’t even in the room. Beyond making me mad, it would get Dee upset which in turn would make me angrier. She had enough to deal with battling her cancer and she didn’t need the extra problems of dealing with a discriminating nurse.

Balancing being a partner and a caregiver can be hard sometimes. After all there was a relationship before the medical incident or illness struck and hopefully it was a good one. Sometimes when a person gets sick or they are facing the end of their life, they get down right unbearable and they don’t want a partner anymore. Then you are faced with caregiving for the same person that you struggling with your personal feelings over. I have a hard time trying to figure out how I would feel if I’d had to take care of Dee while she was hollering at me or throwing things at me. I know that people have had to face this sort of thing with their partners and I have to thank my lucky stars that Dee handled it in a more positive way. This is one area that I expect to learn more about as the support community builds on Partner Caregivers.

Share Your Experiences

There are probably many more similarities between partner caregivers then I have listed here. This wasn’t meant to be an all inclusive list but just a sampling to show people that they do have things in common with other caregivers. Hopefully if you haven’t already joined the community, you will consider doing so now. I had often wished that I had people to talk to who could really understand what I was going through. In fact Dee herself wished that I had people to talk to and even tried to convince me to start talking to one of my ex-girlfriends because she knew that we were friends who had lost contact. While it is too late for me now, I hope that my experiences can help other partner caregivers and that together we can support each other.