Michelle Paige Paterson had been New York’s first lady for less than a day when her husband scheduled a news conference Tuesday to talk about the couple’s affairs during a rough patch in their marriage.

Talk about baptism by fire.

Just days before Gov. David Paterson and his wife fielded tough queries from the media about their personal lives, Paige Paterson faced other questions about whether he had intervened to help her when she was a lobbyist for Harlem’s North General Hospital.

According to published reports, Paterson, then the Democratic state Senate leader, helped arrange a meeting between his wife and the powerful Assembly speaker at which the hospital’s financial problems were discussed.

Longtime friends of New York’s first couple say that if anyone is up to the pressure of living in the media glare, it’s Paige Paterson, whose husband was sworn in as governor Monday after Eliot Spitzer resigned over a prostitution scandal.

She has “a strong sense of faith. She is shy, but whatever comes her way, she has the inner strength to face it with confidence,” her pastor, the Rev. Calvin Butts of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, said Tuesday.

Paige Paterson, 46, graduated from Syracuse University in upstate New York and earned a master’s degree in health management from Manhattan’s New School.

In 2004, she began working as an executive with the Health Plan of New York, where her focus is childhood obesity and other health issues.

Paterson called the news conference after giving an interview the day before in which he confessed to marital infidelity. He said he was speaking out to stop rumors.

On Tuesday, with his wife holding his hand as they walked in, Paterson told reporters that they had both had affairs during a rocky time in their marriage, but that they had sought counseling and have built a stronger union.

Minutes before Paige Paterson faced the media, she spoke by phone with her pastor, according to Butts.

“She said, ‘This is my life now and I have to adjust to my life being more or less an open book,’” he said.

Paige Paterson met her husband in 1982 and, they married a decade later at Manhattan’s Riverside Church with about 1,000 guests attending.

They have two children _ Ashley, a 19-year-old student at Ithaca College who is from Paige Paterson’s previous marriage, and Alex, a 14-year-old boy who attends public school in New York City _ and split their time between homes in Harlem and outside Albany.

During Monday’s swearing-in, the couple seemed like the picture of devotion. She watched him with tears in her eyes as he took the oath of office, and he introduced her as “my wife and lifelong friend.”

Afterwards she said: “Every time I hear David speak, I want to cry. I’m just very happy I was able to live to see this day. ... He’s a very special person.”

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The Associated Press News Research Center contributed to this report.