Making your Marriage Work in Sickness and in Health.

When you think about marriage tips for making a marriage work, you’re usually thinking about how to make it work when you and your spouse are both healthy and going about the regular business of life. However, it’s important that couples understand that in the most successful marriages, couples have to be ready for events that are out of the ordinary, those devastating events that you can’t foresee but for which you must be ready.

Here’s a story from my own experience: It’s Christmas time and the season for neighborhood Christmas parties. A party is organized for one street in a large subdivision. The elderly couple who live two doors down from the party location are looking forward to being with their friends. He is 85 and she is 78.

During the party, the wife falls in the hallway, landing on her side. She breaks her shoulder, elbow and hip. EMS is called and arrives accompanied by the fire department. EMS provides treatment while the fire department gets the injured out of the house.

The host of the party calls one of the sons of the couple who lives a couple of blocks away—that son is me! I arrive at about the time the EMS asks my father what medicines his wife takes. She herself is in too much pain to be of much help.

My father can’t answer the question. (She takes eight meds!) They then ask what her doctors’ names are and he can’t answer that either. (She has four doctors).

EMS can do little to make my mother comfortable without this information, so I take my father back home to search for the meds or a list or something. He searches the bathroom while I look for my mother’s purse. When I find her purse, I find her wallet inside it and inside the wallet is the medicine list. We rush back to the scene to give the information to the EMS, who then radio the hospital the list and get directions on treatment.

My parents had been married 57 years, used pretty good communication skills, especially about financial matters. But the medical communication “detail” had escaped them.

The average young woman, recently married, takes at least two over-the-counter or prescription meds. Their spouse may or may not even know they take anything. Sometimes that’s still the case even after decades of marriage; but knowing medical information about your spouse is important on two levels. Most evident is the practical reason, but another reason is that in a successful marriage the couple shows by their level of communication that they care about one another. Knowing your spouse’s health care information—or at least where that information is kept—is another sign of your love, care and concern for your spouse.

Lesson learned: With a sound business side and regular, structured communication about everything that affects a couple in health and in sickness, the delay in making my mother comfortable would have been avoided.