Effects of care recipients’ behaviour -Shoshana

 

Shoshana’s husband has some behavioural issues and can be critical of her in public.

Written testimony

With his symptoms come behavioural issues. For someone who used to be very patient and very easy going, [he] is not anymore. That’s really hard to deal with because of the short temper, the anger that has changed over the years. And of course I would be the brunt of that. He would criticize, if we had someone here, he would criticize something I might have done. Lately what it is is I’m not doing things the way he would do things. And it’s like, “Big deal, right?” Like, it’s not a big deal. But it is to him. I don’t word sentences the way he would word them. He’ll say, “Like, you mean this.” And I say, “No, I mean what I said originally,” because I’m not wording it the way he would word it, and these are little things but this is what it’s coming to. And he will criticize things when there are people here, and that’s very embarrassing for me.
I was going through a really bad time with the illness. That was a lot of verbal abuse. There was no physical abuse or anything, but verbal, and it wears you down. It depresses you. So I had—I don’t remember who suggested us to contact the MS Society. So I did, and I found that there was a support group for wives whose husbands have MS. And so, I attended one session one evening, and these women were all further along in their illnesses with their husbands. They were, most of them were quite a bit older than me as well, and I was in the newer stages of it. I was very, very depressed, and if I can give a visual… I don’t know how to swim. I remember the feeling of being in water and that thing about going down 3 times, coming up, going down, and the third time you don’t come up again. And I really felt like I was drowning. I felt… like, I was terrified of drowning—water—because I can’t swim and I have no control.

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