More sickness
A couple of weeks ago, I complained here in this space about my runny nose, my aching head, my cough-induced raw throat, and a few other ailments plaguing me at the time (actually, I complained two days in a row, here and here). My wife took good care of me during my sickness, but just about the time I started feeling like my normal self again, she started coughing. She spent this past week trying to will her cough to go away, but it finally got the best of her on Friday, the day I played football for three hours and came home barely able to move.
In one of those previous posts, I wrote:
On the other side of things, I don't much like for her to be sick. I do enjoy and crave the responsibility of caring for her in her vulnerability, but I hate the helpless feeling of not being able to heal her myself. About a year ago she developed some sort of bronchitis and could not stop coughing. She suffered quite a bit, but (even by her account) not as much as I did. I hated that I couldn't defend her from the infection inside her body. I wanted to take it into my own so that she wouldn't have to hurt anymore. But I couldn't. All I could do was give her medicine, keep her as comfortable as possible, and kiss her forehead all day long.
She appears to be suffering from the same thing now as she was then (diagnosed as asthmatic bronchitis), only this time seems worse. The inhalers the doctor prescribed seemed to work magic back then, but now they don't offer much relief. She coughs constantly except while sleeping, mucus clogs her nasal passages so she can't breathe through her nose, and her temperature hovers around 101 and 102 degrees.
I've been doing my best to take care of her even though I'm shuffling around like a 95-year-old. She may have hit a turning point on Sunday. My constant attention and some turkey soup from our NY surrogate parents Russ and Sue have raised her spirits considerably. As I write this she's happily watching an episode of Law & Order.
I met a guy once who told me that his wife had just recovered from a year-long bout with some sort of cancer. He told me that the year had been difficult, but he had stayed with her. He actually stuck out his chest when he said that, and also mentioned that some of his friends didn't understand why he wouldn't leave her. I wanted to paraphrase Chris Rock and say, "Whaddaya want, a cookie? You're not supposed to leave your wife, you low-expectation-having foulfilthblankinswearword!"
I don't mean to be judgmental. I've never been in that position, so I can't say with certainty how I would handle it. But I do know that the times when my wife is sick and vulnerable are the times I feel the greatest affection toward her. It's those times when I can really serve her without expecting anything in return, which after all is how I'm supposed to serve her all the time.
