She's neither.

Rollmann, of North Raleigh, is a diehard hockey fan with a sharp tongue and a booming laugh that turned heads in the coffee shop at Borders the first time we met.

Rollmann is also a devoted caregiver to her husband, who was head-injured in a car accident 15 years ago and now gets around in a wheelchair.

It wasn't supposed to be this way, of course. Rollmann married Bob almost 19 years ago. He was the older man, established in his career as an engineer. It was his second marriage, her first. She worked part time and was newly pregnant when the accident happened.

"I always thought he'd take care of me," she said.

Then, July 9, 1990, driving home from work, Bob was hit head-on. His injuries, including a burst bladder and a crushed pelvis, are too numerous to list.

But the worst was the head trauma. When Bob came out of his coma, he didn't remember that Rosemary was pregnant.

Since then, she has been on the roller coaster of care for a head-injured man.

In the early years, he functioned reasonably well. He couldn't drive or work. But he could walk. He was well enough to care for himself some of the time. Five years after the accident, they had a second son.

But over the past several years, his condition has deteriorated. In some ways, what makes it worse is that, at first meeting, he seems OK. He still has the same sense of humor that drew her to him in the first place.

But he's highly emotional. He gets depressed. His calls for help are incessant. And now he needs Rosemary's help just to move around.

Some days, Rosemary said bluntly, she feels like throttling him. Some days, she sneaks out to her van with the cell phone and sobs to a friend.

"As well spouses, we are tired of the placating remarks ('you are an angel,' 'it must be so hard,' 'you are so brave' ... blah, blah, blah .....)," she wrote me in an e-mail message.

Rosemary doesn't want your pity.

She wants affordable respite care. She wants reserved handicapped seating at the RBC Center for hockey games. She wants an afternoon off.

More than anything, though, she wants to talk with someone who understands. Really understands.

For years, she searched online for such a resource. She found support groups for people with all manner of problems -- except for caregivers like herself.

Finally, in a little box that ran with a Better Homes and Gardens story, she read about a group called Well Spouse, a national organization devoted to the spouses or partners of the chronically ill or disabled. Rollmann finds relief in the online forum at the association's Web site (www.wellspouse.org).

But Rollmann would like to do more. She is trying to set up a local Well Spouse support group so she and others can get together and share the joys and challenges of their roles.

"I think it may be surprising," she said. "There are probably a lot of people out there just like me who think they're all alone."

They're not.