She was still not able to work, volunteer, go to school or keep up on housework. She sleeps for 15+ hours a day on a regular basis. The good news, was that she wasn't cycling all over the place. Her memory got better (her short-term memory was impacted by many of the drugs).

 

I told my self "she was previously at -1000, and she is now still at -100 which sucks, but I can live with it and hopefully it can slowly get better." I have been on her case to get her into therapy for most of this time, but those initial sessions at the first hospital really turned her off to that. There was also the religious issue.

We had both been Christians for most of our lives. When we got married, one of our bride's maids told us that we were the most "real" Christians that she had ever met. That slowly changed. By 2000, she was exploring Judaism and I self identified as a deist. By 2004 I was able to completely cut over and say I didn't believe that any personal god, as described by any major religion, existed and began to call my self an atheist (at least to myself and to my wife).

This was incredibly freeing for me. I don't see how any loving god or free will can exist in a world with mental illnesses. It also freed me from so many paradoxical beliefs that were really causing me stress. It was one of the hardest things of my life (even over all of those hospitalizations for my wife) but one of the most valuable. It also served to turn me into an outsider to almost all of my friends and family. I think they would have had an easier time if I had announced that I was a gay porn actor.

 

When I first blurted out that I didn't believe in a god to my friends, there was just stunned silence and then the subject changed. I only feel that I have 2 friends left that I can really talk to after that.

My wife still has really bitter feelings about Christianity. When I finally did convince her to go get a therapist, she found one who on the first session pretty much said "I think you would be much happier if you went back to Church and became a Christian again." Bad move. My wife then had my health insurance try to find a non-christian therapist within a 100 mile radius. They called every one and had no luck. I am so mad about this. I finally got her willing to explore therapy and then it blew up in our faces.

This time period also was marked by both of us really gaining weight. This started on the job I mentioned in Olympia. We were on the road for over 9 months living in short-term housing as I traveled for work. We ate out all the time. I went from 230 to 340 pounds and she went from 150 to 240 or so. When she went Atkins diet to loose weight it exposed a whole raft of food allergies. Wheat/Gluten, Eggs, Dairy, Beef, Peanuts and several other minor ones. Eliminating those foods really helped improve her overall health, but now count as one more thing that has been "robbed" from her life. She is very bitter about this sometimes.

The cramps that had happened earlier also intensified, resulting in her having a hysterectomy. She was in her early 30s so this of course hit while her body was busy saying "baby, baby, I need a baby." Much marital stress.

We had noticed for a long time that she was much worse during winter. All of her hospitalizations were between late Fall and Spring when it was dark and rainy in Seattle.

We eventually moved to a small town in Eastern Washington to get more sun and to be closer to her parents. I had been working from home for many years and was able to keep my Bellevue-based job. I thought that this would be a great move. I didn't see my friends all that often and I was going to be in Bellevue enough that I thought that I would be OK. I was wrong.

 

When you don't work in a community and don't have a church affiliation in a very church-centric town, you have very limited ways of meeting people. Combine this with no face-to-face contact at work and not a lot of live music/arts/other activities and you get a lot of loneliness.

Her mom and dad had always been huge supports to us. They helped us with some financial difficulties, they helped fix stuff like cars and complex house problems and they generally supplied a lot of love. They also don't get how we could no longer be Christians and find us generally "complex and bewildering." In 2007 her dad was diagnosed with an aggressive and terminal prostate cancer.

2008 was a strange year. I was traveling a lot for work, but we were having a pretty good time all things being considered. She gets really teary when ever she thinks of him. Mourning has definitely started and it is long and painful. At the same time, he is still getting around pretty well.

In March 08 I came home from a tough work-week in Seattle. My wife said that her stomach hurt, but I was tired after the three hour drive and went to bed at around 7:00.

 

At 9:00 she said that she was in a huge amount of pain and I took her to the emergency room at the local medical clinic. I was dead on my feet through this. They scanned and poked and prodded her and ruled out everything that could kill her by morning, so they sent her home at 3:00 AM. They couldn't tell much from the scans because of what they thought was constipation. I was so tired all I could do is crack a "The doctor says you are full of shit!" joke.

NOTE: Never work on your computer system when you are that tired and there is that much going on. I wiped out my entire itunes library--and my backup--while I was trying to "fix" something the next day. Doh!

Three weeks later, she finally made it in to surgery. They thought that they were looking at a recurrence of some of the issues that had caused the hysterectomy several years before. The plan was to remove both ovaries. They were wrong. (I know you are shocked by this...)

 

The doctor came out about 3 hours later than he originally estimated to tell us what was going on. He started out "in med school, they teach you that when you hear animals running that you look for horses. Sometimes they are zebras, but you don't go looking for zebras. Your wife was a Zebra." Her parents and I busted up laughing: Of course it was a Zebra. She never does anything the easy/common way. It is always the complication/side effect.

 

What they found was that one of her ovaries had twisted, cut off its blood supply and exploded. The "shit" from the scans was really exploded ovary goo sticking all of her abdominal organs together. They had to create a 8" incision and scrape out everything. They ended up leaving the good ovary.

By late August, she was again in a lot of pain from the surgery. The scar tissue was causing the remaining ovary to bleed. So surgery #2 was scheduled to remove it. That surgery proved to be difficult. They had to re-open the 8" incision from the first surgery and scrape things out again. A week later she was still in a lot of pain. She went back to the hospital and they thought she was doing well and sent her home with more drugs. By Friday, it was clear that she had an infection.

They rushed her back to the hospital. After scans, the doctor came out and told us that she had a softball sized pocket of puss filling her abdomen and was dangerously close to multiple system failure. He said that they would try and drain the puss, but that if that didn't work they would have to re-open the incision and let it heal from inside out over the next 6 months. The would include opening the wound every 4-6 hours, cleaning it and re-bandaging it.  This would require nursing care.

Fortunately the drain worked.

She was in instant menopause now on top of everything else. She still can't lift much, and twisting (such as when sweeping or walking the dog) really hurts her. All of this also turned 2008-2009 into what I call "the year of the monk." Sex definitely was not high on her list of priorities.

Meanwhile, we had gone on a vacation with a dear friend (who happens to be a therapist). This friend and I had many deep talks. One one of them she said "Look Charles, you have been doing wonderful at taking care of your wife. You have made a ton of hard choices and done what you needed to do for you both to survive. Now you need to take care of yourself. You need to live." We talked a lot about diet, working out, cooking, work, entertainment, social network, religion, family and all of that.

I left with a plan. I went to my doctor and got a physical and got gym membership. I started Power Yoga and working on the elliptical. In October, I got a personal trainer. I have lost roughly 50 pounds since September 08 while putting on a large amount of muscles. I went from a 48 waist in jeans to a 36. You can read more about this (especially the yoga part) here.

 

I now have awesome legs/butt and can actually see pecs, biceps, triceps, shoulders etc. I cook a lot and eat a ton more healthy now. I actually think of myself as "sexy" for the first time in my life. It also resulted in a large increase in libido (in the middle of the year of the monk).

 

This whole time, I have been making sure that everything I am doing is something that I am changing is something that I can keep up for the rest of my life.  I am really focused on long-term sustainability now.

We decided to move to California (but we can't move until our house sells). There are a lot more medical treatment options down there, and out therapist friend would help my wife find a therapist who would work for her. This was key. She definitely needs therapy, but our previous attempts had been disastrous. We aren't going to get the help that we need without assistance, and the friend was willing and able to provide this assistance.

What a Catch 22... Stay in Washington so she could be with her dying father but get no treatment, or move to California to take advantage of our friend's help to get therapy to try and deal with this before he dies. It is clear to me that staying where we are is not going to work. She has too much going on and we need coordinated health care that we can't get in rural Eastern Washington. Seattle is also not an option due to winter depressions that we had previously fled from (and this had been a particularly yucky winter in Seattle this year).

We finished 2008 with a trip to California over Christmas/New Years to again visit our friend. My wife had been having a large amount of jerky seizures so her doctor had re-prescribed the medicine from "part 1" that had been involved in the 'pool of blood' episode. This medicine is the only one that treats that specific problem.

It did help with the seizures, but it also brought all of the hell of the 90s back in force. The cutting fantasy, the wild mood swings and mixed states, the obliteration of short-term memories, the inability to find words when she talks. Everything. I wonder how much of the hell of the 90s was due to this medicine... The doctor took her back off of it immediately when we got back from California. I think that the loss of the ovaries and trauma related to the surgeries and infection threw her out of balance again. She was so much worse than she had been.

I spent a lot of time with the friend learning more about cooking and talking about my wife while she slept. This vacation was the first time I had ever spent time living with a woman who is whole and self sufficient.  We ran errands, planned meals, cooked, cleaned, went on hikes and generally had a blast. My wife joined us when she could. We are both convinced that I need a social network and that I need to get out more to do things that I enjoy (arts, music, movies, spending time with friends etc). We were both shocked and heartbroken to see the change in her ability to function. 

I came home from the vacation jazzed. I had leaned a lot and had a blast. It gave me the push I needed to finish getting the house ready for sale (it went on the market in February--anyone want a really nice house in Ephrata WA?).  Very quickly, the pressure of trying to clean (and keep clean) the house became overwhelming and that elation turned into deep depression. I had to do everything. I had to nag her to do basic things like put her clothes in the hamper. It took its tole on me.

It sounds strange, but I had lots and lot of experience being sad, scared, heartbroken, sobbing, angry and all of that over those 15 years, but I had avoided depression myself until this January. Her 'relapse' had shocked me my core.I have always thought that Kristin would get worse again someday, but seeing it happen is something else entirely. It is hitting me at a gut level.

I just don't know how I can manage going through this again. This time, I KNOW how bad the journey is and how little there is to look forward to when she is "stabilized." I have completely given up now on her ever being "well." I look at myself and say "how can I get through this again?" The answer comes back "I can't, it is too hard, it hurts too much."

I REALLY need to stop asking myself that question.

While I am terribly depressed myself, she is actually doing much better and is roughly back in 2000's -100 level stability. She is still dealing with the surgery complications and medicine tweaking but she is generally as "ok" as she has been since we were dating before those pills.

I started seeing a therapist myself in late February. We have only met twice so far.