Psoriatic Arthritis, COVID-19, My Husband, and My Guilt

It’s been an especially difficult 6-week medication cycle for me. I usually experience increased and additional psoriatic arthritis manifestations during the hottest months of the summer. The only difference is that I’m usually home alone, and do not have an audience. Let me tell you, COVID-19 has really ruined my suffering in silence. I feel so seen, and not in the good sense.

I joke about suffering in silence, but when your spouse is at work 8-10 hours of the day they miss certain nuances of your day. He's been working from home, in my office, since March. I now work in bed or on the couch. That is when I’m working. There’ve been a lot of days I just can’t seem to get much done. On days where my psoriatic arthritis is bad and I basically relocate from the bed to the couch, I feel so guilty any time he walks out of the office.

Mornings have been hard

At first, I wasn’t as self-aware. It started out with a few bad mornings where I woke up and tried to get out of bed and just couldn’t. My joints were on fire and ached. I was tired and ready for a nap, even though I was just waking up. I texted my husband asking if he could feed the dogs on his break, something I usually did when I got up. Our routine was a simple one. He gets up first and walks the dogs, and an hour later I get up and feed them. Suddenly, I couldn’t.

The first time this happened, I chalked it up to my needing the next dose of my biologic soon, and it’s also 110 degrees outside. The first few days, he happily obliged. Then it morphed into him walking the dogs, feeding the dogs, and then doing their next walk and I was still in bed. My guilt was there but it subtly pushed itself to the back of my head because my psoriatic arthritis made me so dang tired.

Chores were pushed aside

My usual routine of a load of laundry or two every few days began to push further out. Cleaning of a couple of rooms or the floors became one room or one floor. I stopped responding to email as quickly and my freelance work took less importance.

As we fumbled into the month of July, something was very off.

It was me.

Mutual guilt

During last month's shot day, my husband told me how stressed he was becoming with the workload for the dogs. He felt guilty, too, for feeling stressed. Now that I was getting my next dose he was hopeful that I’d be back to my normal routine. As the main breadwinner and insurance provider, the last thing I want for him is to feel work-stress because of me. There is a heavy weight to the guilt one feels when they place this type of stress on their loved one.

I also think this is where things began to sink in for him. They sunk in for me, too.

He told me how his new chores were starting to stress him out because he was afraid of getting in trouble with work. Then began to realize how many small things I did throughout the day while he was away at work. He felt guilty because I was only asking for help with the dogs in the morning. Meanwhile, I realized how many small things I really do throughout the day. I then grew upset that I couldn’t do them with ease. This is a cycle with a chronic illness that I think a lot of partners don’t talk about with one another. Thankfully, cycles come and go. Unfortunately, unless you have good communication it can bring on fighting.

Managing guilt and psoriatic arthritis together

I’m glad he told me how he was feeling. It helped me know how he was feeling and what he needed from me to push through versus not. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been bad days where I couldn’t push myself. We made a plan for me to tell him if I needed help. By giving him the heads up that I needed help with the dogs, or cleaning something later in the day, he was able to plan accordingly.

This hasn’t completely alleviated my guilt. I still feel bashful on those days he sees me curled up with the dogs under a blanket without a laptop in sight. But that is a Jaime problem, and I’m working on it.

Has psoriatic arthritis and COVID-19 impacted your home life with guilt? Let’s talk about it.