Dear Prudence,
My wife is CEO of a small company and puts in long hours; we’re both textbook workaholics. A few weeks ago, she mentioned that she’d been noticing two small lumps in one of her breasts for a couple of months, but she hadn’t had them examined because she didn’t have time. Since then, I’ve been urging her to make an appointment with a doctor. She always finds an excuse to delay, and as of this morning, she screamed at me to get out of her face, quit nagging her, and not bring up the subject again. What can I do to persuade her to take the lumps seriously and have them examined, when she perceives so many other things as more immediately urgent, and now reacts with intense and almost abusive anger when I try to remind her?