It's been awhile since I blogged here. Those who have been around for the past year will remember from my old blogs what happened between Z and myself. I thought this might shed a bit of a different light on what can happen in a marriage even when one partner is bound and hopelessly determined that divorce is the only option left. This will be in a chapter on family support. (for those who are unaware, a book is in the making on some health issues I've been dealing with for some time)
My husband made the biggest turnaround though. The same man who screamed in my face that I was just lazy, a crazy bipolar person who made him feel like a single parent because I just couldn’t drag myself from the computer long enough to wash a load of clothes or go downstairs to wash a sink full of dishes, or straighten up in the house after me or our daughter. He turned into my biggest champion, and I can absolutely, honestly say there is no possible way I could have come this far without him.
Having said that however, it wasn’t until my worst crash that it finally began to click for him, I think. It came right after having an injection of Kenalog from a doctor, and feeling GRRRRRRRRRREAT!!!!! – for 3 days. Then I crashed. By now you know what I mean when I say that. Stuffy nose to the point I didn’t think I was ever going to breathe through my nose again. Migraine that would NOT go away for days on end. It felt like one constant ice pick in the temple. All of the worst moments post-partum, rapid cycling mood swings, roller coaster highs and abysmal lows, the feeling like it was a monumental sinus infection complete with nasty green crap oozing from every hole in my face, congestion going into my lungs making it impossible to breathe (let alone use my inhaler).
He finally got it. I think that drove it home that this was real, not something I made up to get out of doing household chores. Three days of barely needing an asthma inhaler, waking up with NO pain whatsoever, having energy…to looking and acting like the walking dead. It took that drastic fall for him to realize that steroids aren’t ‘feel-good’ drugs; IF you feel better on them, it’s because your body NEEDED the cortisol. My body certainly did.
I had to describe what I went through so I could illustrate what it took for my husband to get on board with the fact that this isn’t just something I made up. Now he does everything he can to help me, and in turn help himself. It uncovered his own hypothyroidism and the fact that somehow, somewhere, he picked up EBV (Epstein Barr Virus, or Mononucleosis) . He would have gone forever before going to a doctor to find out why HE was so exhausted, brain fogged, listless, and depressed.
And as time progressed, as he watched me slowly getting better once I started on the hydrocortisone, reemerging into the woman he met before all this came about, he took it even more seriously. Don’t get me wrong; he’s a guy, and still very human. He still gets frustrated just like I do, like everyone does. He can be a real jerk sometimes (so can I), but it doesn’t take long before he comes around again to realize where the frustration is coming from, and we work it out.
There are still tears, and anger on both sides to work through. But now we are both in a better frame of mind to actually do that. It’s becoming easier to see when it’s time for a stress dose, or time to take a break and cool off. That, to me, is the most amazing difference. Had you asked me a year before this, I would have sworn we were headed for divorce. Sadly, many do end up divorcing without ever discovering that it was all ‘fixable’. Today I am determined that won’t happen to us. I know there’s no way to predict the future, but you can’t tell me there isn’t hope to be found from our story. Peace.
rss feed ::
suggestions / issues
is for informational purposes only. It does not provide legal, financial or therapeutic
