Thank you all so much for your good wishes and healing thoughts. I have no words to express how deeply I appreciate each of you for just "showing up." When I read your responses, I started to cry. Yeah... I'm sensitive like that.
My husband isn't any better... but he isn't any worse, either. That's good news. He's really enjoying watching the kittens now that they are able to run and play. In fact, he can't seem to stay away from them! And, since I'm talking about my husband, let's REALLY talk about him.
He's had MS for twenty-four years. In the late 80's, when he was married to his first wife, he was in a wheelchair for a year. The doctors told him he would never walk again... but they didn't understand who they were dealing with. He was determined to regain the use of his legs. He had a nurse coming into his home every day to use an EMS device on his leg muscles. He eventually started physical therapy and, to the surprise of his doctors, he was walking again with the use of a cane. Eventually, he didn't need the cane, either.
In May or June of 1996, he was experiencing a lot of pain, fatigue, muscle weakness, and many other problems when he went to his neurologist. An MRI was ordered and what they found was devastating. There was a huge lesion on his brain stem. His doctor scheduled an appointment to speak to him and his first wife together... explaining there was an 80% chance that he would die within the year, probably within months.
My husband's first wife considered his MS to be a "problem" and she was tired of "seeing his sad face" all the time. She thought it would be best if he went to California and stayed with his parents where he could be cared for -- and so he went. Every day for many months, he put on his wetsuit and got in the ocean. He'd float on the waves for an hour or more while focusing on the lesion on his brain stem. He visualized it growing smaller and smaller and the myelin sheath surrounding his nerves regenerating.
He returned to Arizona in October for a beta interferon treatment in the hospital. This medication was supposed to be delivered over a twelve hour period but someone at the hospital made a mistake and set the IV to deliver the fluid in a two hour period. Know what happened? He died. Yep, he saw the light, heard someone calling his name, the whole kit-and-caboodle. While he was out of his body, he remembers interacting with a being who told him that it wasn't time for him to leave... that a whole new life awaited him. So, he awoke with nurses and doctors surrounding him, a tube down his throat, and burns on his chest from the paddles. (They don't show those burn marks on television, do they?)
His doctor ordered a new MRI to make sure that he hadn't suffered any brain damage from his near-death experience (and why do they call it a "near death" experience if the person has no pulse and isn't breathing... isn't that a DEATH experience?). When the doctor came in to tell him what he'd found on the MRI, neither he or his doctor could believe it. The lesion that was on his brain stem was gone and only scar tissue remained in it's place. This is happy news, right? Not for his wife. She didn't seem happy at all and she refused to talk to him about her feelings. He told her that if she wasn't happy and she didn't want to discuss matters with him, he would just go back to his parent's house. She said that would be best.
Two weeks later, he received a letter in the mail. In that letter she told him that, because she thought he was going to die, she had moved on -- for the CHILDREN'S sake! She had been seeing her boss for months. On Thanksgiving Day in 1996, she moved out of the house and in with her lover so... he returned to an empty house on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.
On Friday, December 13, 1996, I stopped by to see how he was doing and to invite him over for Christmas dinner. He hadn't been out of his house since he'd returned from California so I told him he needed to get out and do something. I offered to play pool with him sometime if he was interested. He said, "How about tomorrow night?"
So, our first "date" was on December 14, 1996. We've been together ever since. He proposed to me seventeen days later, on New Year's Day. We were married two months after that first date, on Valentine's Day 1997. I became pregnant with our son two months after that. We didn't waste any time, did we? It's like that line at the end of When Harry Met Sally... "...when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible." ;-)
Wow, that was a lot to write. It helped take my mind off of things for a while.
10 years ago
