Directory of health resources for healthcare professionals.

Sympathy and worry      Helplessness, dependency, and control      Feelings about sex      Relationships with your children      Relationships with drug users     Sympathy and Worry-By the imagination we place ourselves in [their] situations, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into [their] bodies, and become in some measure the same person with [them]. . . . [We] not only feel a sorrow of the same kind with that which they feel, but as if [we] had derived a part of it to [ourselves]; what [we] feel seems to alleviate the weight of what they feel. . . . The sweetness of [our] sympathy more than compensates the bitterness of that sorrow.     People are built to feel connections to one another. The word sympathy comes from a Greek word that means “feeling with,” or more literally, “co-suffering.” When we see someone in pain, we feel pain too. It is as if, as Adam Smith said, we become in some measure the same person. When someone sympathizes with us, our pain is relieved. It is as if we could split the same packet of pain between us.     For caregivers, feeling sympathy means being intensely involved with those being cared for. “I want to be a part of taking care of Dean,” Dean Lombard’s partner says. “If God wants him back to where he was, I want to be a part of that, of getting him to walk out the door.” For people with HIV infection, sympathy amounts to a cure. It provides comfort, sustenance, healing; it is an antidote to pain, loneliness, and loss. June Monroe’s son says, “My mother has the ability to keep me alive.”     As in all human relations, what sometimes is an alliance is at other times a source of conflict. People with HIV infection sometimes feel their caretakers’ sympathy and involvement as a burden, a responsibility: “It gets to be hard,” Steven Charles said about all his worried relatives, “making myself comfortable and everyone else too.” And as in many conflicts, both sides are right.
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Women who are already infected or who have a high risk of being infected, and who are contemplating pregnancy or who are already pregnant, should get tested. The reason is that the mother poses a risk to her unborn child. About one-third of all children born to an infected mother will become infected. The best way to avoid this is to prevent pregnancy through effective birth control. Once pregnant, it might be best to consider an abortion. Abortions are far more easily performed early in pregnancy, so pregnant women with HIV infection should consider this option early in pregnancy, and pregnant women with a risk of HIV infection should be tested as early as possible.
People who have been the source of blood exposure to a health care worker also pose a risk to others. That is, if a health care worker was exposed to blood, the person who was the source of the blood should get tested. Note that the major concern is exposure to blood, since no other body fluids are known to transmit the virus in job-related injuries.
Likewise, donors of blood, sperm, or organs pose a potential risk to those who receive the blood, sperm, or organs. These people will also be tested.
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