This research sought to better understand how older female spouses cope with a partner’s coronary artery bypass graft surgery and to explore coping’s relationships with life-change stress, cognitive appraisal, resilience, social support, and aspects of spouse’s surgery. A sample of 96 women, aged from 55 to 81 years, completed surveys after their partner’s surgery. Folkman and Lazarus’ ways of coping (WCQ) scales yielded two factors in this sample—reactive coping and adaptive coping. Reactive coping, including more emotion-focused ways of coping from the WCQ, was associated only with more time spent anticipating spouses’ surgeries. Women described the greatest use of ways of coping labeled adaptive, which in turn had significant relationships with greater resilience, social support, and positive appraisal of the surgical experience. Stepwise multiple regression found greater resilience, more frequent religious participation, and fewer children to be distinct predictors of adaptive coping. Nursing staff are encouraged to accept and normalize reactive coping, while facilitating adaptive coping with surgical stresses. 1. Introduction The leading cause of noncommunicable death (NCD) world-wide in 2008 was cardiovascular disease, accounting for 17 million, or 48%, of all NCD deaths [1]. Heart disease may lead to patients’ physical and emotional distress, job loss, disability, and reduced quality of life [2–4]. While much empirical research suggests that coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery is stressful for the patient [5], the patient’s spouse may be under more stress than the patient [6, 7]. The spouse may demonstrate poorer psychological adjustment and higher levels of anxiety and depression than the patient [6], both immediately and following acute cardiac events, such as acute myocardial infarction (AMI), heart failure [8], CABG surgery [2], as well as during the first 3 months after hospital discharge [9, 10]. During and after acute cardiac interventions, spouses may well be “forgotten” in an environment devoted to the patient [11–13]. Spouses may also be more immediately concerned about the changing marital roles, as the burden of care giving and other responsibilities falls on their shoulders [6, 7]. While the impact of partners’ CABG surgery upon spouses is well documented in general, there is a dearth of research concerning how the older female spouse copes with her partner’s acute surgical event. Artinian’s research [11, 12, 14], along with Dracup et al.’s work [8], has addressed multiple factors that may affect the spouse’s coping with a
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