See? This is what happens when I get confident. I feel good. Life is going just fine. We start making plans. Then Steve is gasping for air and taking nitroglycerin and I want to put my head between my knees to just lie down on the floor somewhere in a blind panic. Yeah, panic makes me lie down. I’m awfully good in a crisis. Nerves of pudding, me.
He’s okay, but I’m back to feeling like the rug under my feet has two big, hairy hands gripping one end.
I don’t get to have a normal life. I miss what I’ve never had.
Oh dear, Julie. Sounds really terrifying. Hang in there.
Ah, Julie, “normal” is highly overrated, anyhow.
When my children were young, many many moons ago, they suffered from a bizarre and little understood genetic disease. Life was one crisis after another – with frequent trips to the emergency room and even more frequent hospitalizations. There were months on end where one or the other or both together were inpatients at the local children’s hospital in Chicago.
There was a constant stream of blood and guts and vomit and lung secretions which showed up at any given hour of any given day.
No one knew if they were going to live long enough to figure out what to do – and no one knew if they’d ever figure out quite what to do, anyhow. And so we just kept treating each new disease and each new symptom with whatever traditional medicine had to offer – little as it was sometimes.
It’s hard not knowing what’s going to happen. It’s even harder to think that each time something does happen that this particular time might be “the time.”
And even when it’s not, it still takes a little part of you away with it.
But, (and here’s the good news) we survive. Not, as you well know, unscathed, but we survive anyhow. And, if we try hard enough, we can even thrive in between the bad times.
I’m sorry for you and your husband. Truly sorry. I just don’t want you to think you’re alone in this, ok? Someone, somewhere, knows exactly what you’re going through and she’s keeping you both in her thoughts and prayers.
Lo
Hang in there girl.
Thank you all for putting up with me.