About
About Donald Kushner, MD
Donald Kushner, MD, is a retired primary care physician and former hospice medical director who has lived with multiple sclerosis for more than twenty years. Before living with MS as a patient, he spent more than two decades caring for people with chronic illness. Often, he cared not only for the patient, but also for the spouse, partner, adult child, or family member helping them live with the disease.
He saw how illness changed appointments, decisions, routines, marriages, caregiving roles, and the quiet negotiations of daily life.
Later, as a hospice medical director, that lesson became even clearer. Hospice care is never only about the diagnosis. It is about the person, the family, the room, the relationships, and the decisions that illness forces into view.
Living with MS gave those observations a different kind of weight. Medicine helped him understand what illness was doing to the body. It took longer to understand what it was doing to relationships, identity, independence, caregiving, and daily life.
The Third Chair grew from that gap: the distance between what medicine can measure and what illness reorganizes inside a relationship.
Areas of Focus
Chronic Illness and Relationships
Caregiving and Family Life
Communication Under Uncertainty
Identity, Independence, and Adaptation
Patient and Care Partner Perspectives
Medical Care, Hospice, and Decision-Making
WHAT IS THE THIRD CHAIR?
What does “The Third Chair” mean?
The Third Chair is the unseen presence chronic illness creates inside a relationship. It changes who watches, who plans, who risks, who waits, and who carries uncertainty.
Over time, illness becomes more than a diagnosis. It begins shaping routines, conversations, decisions, physical space, future plans, identity, and trust.
The framework gives language to this invisible restructuring so people can better understand the complexity illness introduces into close relationships.
WHY THIS WORK MATTERS
Beyond medicine, illness changes relationships.
Chronic illness is often discussed clinically — through symptoms, treatments, and outcomes — while the relational consequences remain largely unspoken.
Yet illness changes nearly every layer of shared life:
✔ marriages and partnerships
✔ parent-child relationships
✔ caregiving roles
✔ communication patterns
✔ social participation
✔ identity and independence
The Third Chair explores these overlooked dimensions through writing, interviews, and long-form discussion.