When Your Partner Falls Ill

Nobody asked you if you wanted this job.

There was a phone call, or a scan, or a fall on the stairs. And somewhere in the weeks after it, without anybody saying so out loud, you stopped being only their partner and became the person who counts the tablets, chases the appointments, and lies awake listening through a wall.

You are still their wife. Their husband. Their partner of thirty years, or of four.

You are also on duty, and you have been for a long time.

People ask how they are. Almost nobody asks how you are — and when somebody finally does, you say fine, because the true answer would take an hour and you do not have one.

This book is for the person nobody asks.

It will not tell you whether to stay, whether to go, or whether it is time for more care. No book can know that, and the ones that pretend to are guessing at your life from a distance. What it will do is say the things nobody says to you: that missing them while they are still in the room is grief, and it has a name. That resentment is a load report, not a verdict on your love. That the thought which frightened you at three in the morning is far more common than you have been allowed to believe.

There is no streak. No days in a row, no catching up, nothing to fall behind on. Put it in a drawer for five months and it will simply be glad to see you.

And every single practice comes in a version for a day with nothing left in it — doable standing at a sink, in a corridor, on the edge of a bed, with somebody calling your name. Because most days are that day, and a book that only works on your good days is no use to you at all.

Inside, gently:

• The first fortnight — the six calls to make in week one, and the two decisions that are not yours to make yet
• Thirty days, arranged as six doors — go in at whichever one is nearest, in any order, at any pace
• The feelings nobody gives you permission to have — resentment, guilt, the thought you have never said out loud, and the one that has no polite name
• What illness does to a partnership — nurse and lover, touch that has become a task, and whether you are still a couple
• Your body — the alarm that never clocks off, the broken sleep, and why rest is not the same as relief
• Your care ceiling — what you can safely provide, and the sentence that gets it written down
• The words for seven phone calls, including the one where they say we cannot discuss that with you
• What a carer's assessment actually involves — and what to do when the answer is no
• When more care is needed, when they start to get better, and when time may be short
• A toolkit of cards, worksheets and scripts, and an index so you can find things again a year from now

Written for the United Kingdom and the United States — and for all four UK nations properly. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland do not work the same way, and this book says so, by name, every time it matters. If you have ever put down a caring book because its advice stopped at somebody else's border, this is the one that does not.

For the wife who has become a nurse. For the husband nobody thinks to ask about. For the partner who never married, whose standing in a hospital corridor sometimes has to be explained twice.

This is not for you if you want a programme to complete. There is nothing here to finish, and nothing to score.

You are a person, not a service. This book starts there.

A companion, never a replacement, for the support of your own doctor, prescriber or adviser.