For sicker...

  • Thread starter Thread starter awsmith1861
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
A

awsmith1861

Guest
Recently my wife was diagnosed with a very serious, very complicated to fix, 60% likely to come out decently after 2-3 years of surgery… never before seen in medical textbooks or even between 2 different well known and respected physicians in town problem (colo-rectal related issues).

It was a sudden shock and unexpected news when what has been ‘dealt with’ inside of her recently made itself unbearable and required emergency medical intervention and some very… very heavy doses of hydrocodone (popularly abused pain meds) to control the pain.

So… This is on the heels of our fifth child in 7.5 years of marriage being born with 3 months of bed rest mandated to prevent her from being too premature.

i am blessed enough to have a work from home job (I’m a computer engineer) that pays well. And its got the insurance to cover the surgeries. What is not as fortunate is we are not well off enough to afford a full time live in maid and I have to actually work and be unavailable during the day.

This has oddly… been the simplest, easiest hurdle in our marriage to date. Needless to say, sex is out of the question and has been for months because of the pregnancy. SO … for you younger pups out there (i’m 39, she’s 24), yes, its possible to live without it and sometimes even in marriage we are called to celibacy.

It has deepened our love for one another tremendously and we are a stronger married couple for it.

What stinks… is that we have not been able to attend mass regularly at all for months now because of the bed rest and now she’s virtually bed ridden now and certainly couldn’t stand sitting on a hard bench for 1 hour of a mass coupled with kids to control (our kids are 7, 5, 3,1, and 1 month old - girl,boy,boy,boy,girl).

However still we are deeply religious and although excused from mass (yes, trust me, we are), this is the 1st time i’m going to have to call the church and ask for a priest to come out and see us for reconciliation and for someone to bring communion to the home.

We’re probably not going to be back in church for 2-6 months once surgeries start on her.

Love your spouses hard, folks. Don’t fight over petty stuff. It can all change in an afternoon and very quickly.
 
Prayers for you and your spouse. My wife went through a health crisis but not as prolonged about a year ago. My wife was bedridden for only a month, though, and recovered after six months. It could have killed her, and I still get bad dreams about that possibility. We did go to Mass, though. With older children, it is easier because they can help with the younger ones. It wouldn’t have been possible had my children been as young as yours, not with an infant, a toddler, and a preschooler. After that, it seemed that some things which I took seriously before weren’t quite so serious. It gives you perspective.
 
Its certainly made us think about what memories we will leave behind.
 
My prayers are ascending for your wife, you, and your family.

I was seriously ill once many years ago and my husband had to be my caretaker, the cook, housekeeper, etc. He did a fine job, but it was quite a sacrifice for him. It did bring us closer together, and because I could have died very easily, it put a lot of things in life into their proper perspective.

15 years later, the tables were turned and I nearly lost him, but once again God brought us through and reminded me of what is important. Thank you for reminding me again, as I sometimes forget these important things in the busyness of living.

May God bless you both and give you His healing, comfort, and strength.
 
awsmith1861 said:
Recently my wife was diagnosed with a very serious, very complicated to fix, 60% likely to come out decently after 2-3 years of surgery… never before seen in medical textbooks or even between 2 different well known and respected physicians in town problem (colo-rectal related issues).

It was a sudden shock and unexpected news when what has been ‘dealt with’ inside of her recently made itself unbearable and required emergency medical intervention and some very… very heavy doses of hydrocodone (popularly abused pain meds) to control the pain.

So… This is on the heels of our fifth child in 7.5 years of marriage being born with 3 months of bed rest mandated to prevent her from being too premature.

i am blessed enough to have a work from home job (I’m a computer engineer) that pays well. And its got the insurance to cover the surgeries. What is not as fortunate is we are not well off enough to afford a full time live in maid and I have to actually work and be unavailable during the day.

This has oddly… been the simplest, easiest hurdle in our marriage to date. Needless to say, sex is out of the question and has been for months because of the pregnancy. SO … for you younger pups out there (i’m 39, she’s 24), yes, its possible to live without it and sometimes even in marriage we are called to celibacy.

It has deepened our love for one another tremendously and we are a stronger married couple for it.

What stinks… is that we have not been able to attend mass regularly at all for months now because of the bed rest and now she’s virtually bed ridden now and certainly couldn’t stand sitting on a hard bench for 1 hour of a mass coupled with kids to control (our kids are 7, 5, 3,1, and 1 month old - girl,boy,boy,boy,girl).

However still we are deeply religious and although excused from mass (yes, trust me, we are), this is the 1st time i’m going to have to call the church and ask for a priest to come out and see us for reconciliation and for someone to bring communion to the home.

We’re probably not going to be back in church for 2-6 months once surgeries start on her.

Love your spouses hard, folks. Don’t fight over petty stuff. It can all change in an afternoon and very quickly.
Click to expand...
I guess you don’t have any family living nearby? I mean, that’s not uncommon these days, unfortunately. We’ve had no one we can count on, for our whole married life. I don’t know how your wife will manage the 5 children without help.

I will add you to my prayers. You sure have a lot on your plate. Thanks for sharing your life with us - I hope people do recognize that life can change in the blink of an eye.
 
TheRealJuliane said:
I guess you don’t have any family living nearby? I mean, that’s not uncommon these days, unfortunately. We’ve had no one we can count on, for our whole married life. I don’t know how your wife will manage the 5 children without help.

I will add you to my prayers. You sure have a lot on your plate. Thanks for sharing your life with us - I hope people do recognize that life can change in the blink of an eye.
Click to expand...
Well, yea, no family nearby. My family is 2 hours away and too busy to come live with us here. We are not from big Catholic familes with lots of kids and people to help (God bless those of you who are blessed with that sort of a pedigree). Anyway, we’re both converts. To the point that we have great trouble finding Godparents for our kids because we have almost zero realtives to choose from. This is yet another good reason to have a large family. When people are in trouble, there is help available with a large family. I’m the head of a huge one now with 5 kids and (after she gets a green light for it from doctors) more kids to come. I suspect we’re OK for contraception at this point. BUT… We’ve talked about it long ago and decided that if this situation ever arose that we would just be celibate. Its honestly just the most beautiful thing and the best sacrifice to help with the healing process. We haven’t discussed it, but I’m quite pleased with it. 8) Focusing the body on the Lord focuses the mind on the Lord which focuses the soul on the Lord.

Trust me, Juliane, God has provided (we don’t use any sort of contraception). So far He has always been there with new car seats… good deals on used cars… good deals on used tires… stopping a narrow chance with accidental death here and there… I could list the number of miracles we’ve been privy to since we got married but it would honestly sound like I was faking it or making it up. He already has some things I can see forming in the works that will help us through this one. 8) I’m actually smiling about some of the cleverness in what I honestly see coming out of all of this. BLessings really are in abundance.

I have a 100k work from home job… Yea, He’s been REALLY good to my family. We have had nothing but great fortune and smiles from above for years. That alone will make it easier. She can bring the to/from school she says, so that’s a HUGE help.

I’ll be on the dishes and laundry and baths and cleaning for a bit in addition to work, but yea… we’ve been blessed. No complaints other than my boss I suspect may be getting tired of family related issues interfering with work.
 
I think it’s a sin that I’m sitting here jealous of you, with tears in my eyes. Yeah, I’m jealous of your 5 kids and more to come, and the love that shines through your post about being celibate because of your wife’s illness. What a beautiful testimony.
 
Well folks… Thank you for your prayers.

Guess what? God saw fit to answer them… She’s fine / no surgery.
 
awsmith1861 said:
Well folks… Thank you for your prayers.

Guess what? God saw fit to answer them… She’s fine / no surgery.
Click to expand...
Does this mean the bed rest is over? I certainly hope so! However, if you do find yourself in need of help with things around the house, reach out to the Knights of Columbus. They are always on the lookout for fellow parishoners in need and they would probably coordinate an effort to help you all keep up with some of the household needs.
 
Iheartcoffee said:
Does this mean the bed rest is over? I certainly hope so! However, if you do find yourself in need of help with things around the house, reach out to the Knights of Columbus. They are always on the lookout for fellow parishoners in need and they would probably coordinate an effort to help you all keep up with some of the household needs.
Click to expand...
Yes, indeed it means just that. She reacted unexpectedly well to the drugs they gave her and then the swelling + pain went down, bowel movements are no longer 2-3 day ordeals to recover from… just amazing. Even the surgeon was surprised and said he didn’t want to operate.

We will have problems like this again at some point and surgery IS in the future, but its not going to be 2-3 years of surgeries. And she may be able to put off the surgery for another decade maybe. When we are blessed with another child, we WILL get the epidural and get it over and done with in a reasonable amount of time next time. Non-epidural deliveries with their longer non-pit induced speed times tend to result in much worse hemorrhoids than those that use an epidural + pit.

hugs and love to all ya’ll. For sicker can really suck but just like for worse and better, you can turn it into a nice spiritual event if you just let God carry you and obey Him + the rules He has for us. I’m still in shock that He saw fit to answer these prayers. I’m quite happy about it and very very grateful.

Deo vindice. 8)
 
awsmith1861 said:
Recently my wife was diagnosed with a very serious, very complicated to fix, 60% likely to come out decently after 2-3 years of surgery… never before seen in medical textbooks or even between 2 different well known and respected physicians in town problem (colo-rectal related issues).

It was a sudden shock and unexpected news when what has been ‘dealt with’ inside of her recently made itself unbearable and required emergency medical intervention and some very… very heavy doses of hydrocodone (popularly abused pain meds) to control the pain.

So… This is on the heels of our fifth child in 7.5 years of marriage being born with 3 months of bed rest mandated to prevent her from being too premature.

i am blessed enough to have a work from home job (I’m a computer engineer) that pays well. And its got the insurance to cover the surgeries. What is not as fortunate is we are not well off enough to afford a full time live in maid and I have to actually work and be unavailable during the day.

This has oddly… been the simplest, easiest hurdle in our marriage to date. Needless to say, sex is out of the question and has been for months because of the pregnancy. SO … for you younger pups out there (i’m 39, she’s 24), yes, its possible to live without it and sometimes even in marriage we are called to celibacy.

It has deepened our love for one another tremendously and we are a stronger married couple for it.

What stinks… is that we have not been able to attend mass regularly at all for months now because of the bed rest and now she’s virtually bed ridden now and certainly couldn’t stand sitting on a hard bench for 1 hour of a mass coupled with kids to control (our kids are 7, 5, 3,1, and 1 month old - girl,boy,boy,boy,girl).

However still we are deeply religious and although excused from mass (yes, trust me, we are), this is the 1st time i’m going to have to call the church and ask for a priest to come out and see us for reconciliation and for someone to bring communion to the home.

We’re probably not going to be back in church for 2-6 months once surgeries start on her.

Love your spouses hard, folks. Don’t fight over petty stuff. It can all change in an afternoon and very quickly.
Click to expand...
Prayers for your family.
 
Forgive me for asking this - in the original post, you said you were 39 and she is 24 - is this correct? And you have been married for 7.5 years??? She was a little young for you when you married her, Iwould think - she must have been 16 when you married and you were 31? I hope it was a typo…
 
Regi said:
Forgive me for asking this - in the original post, you said you were 39 and she is 24 - is this correct? And you have been married for 7.5 years??? She was a little young for you when you married her, Iwould think - she must have been 16 when you married and you were 31? I hope it was a typo…
Click to expand...
👍
You caught that, too? I was so curious about this. I assumed he meant 34, but it is true that is some states, with parental permission, 16yo young adults are legally able to marry.

OP?
 
mommamaree said:
👍
You caught that, too? I was so curious about this. I assumed he meant 34, but it is true that is some states, with parental permission, 16yo young adults are legally able to marry.

OP?
Click to expand...
also, she could have been 17, depending on her birthday… it still seems quite young, but at least better than 16. :eek:
 
Regi said:
Forgive me for asking this - in the original post, you said you were 39 and she is 24 - is this correct? And you have been married for 7.5 years??? She was a little young for you when you married her, Iwould think - she must have been 16 when you married and you were 31? I hope it was a typo…
Click to expand...
Well, those times are approximate.

We married when I was 32 and she was barely 17, yes. Quite young for me I know. To make the umm… ‘scandal’ worse, we had a honeymoon baby 9 months after we were married. By the time she was 19, we had 2 kids.

We’re from Dixie and in some corners out here its still socially acceptable to marry an older man to a younger woman. We met and fell in love just like everyone else does… granted we knew about 2 weeks after we met that we were going to get married, have a large family, and raise Saints. Honestly, if my daughters were to have something similar happen to them I would approve the marriage if the man was a Christian and they were in love.

And our marriage IS legal in the eyes of the Church and the Great State of Georgia. We were very careful to make sure it was a legal marriage because that’s one of the requirements in the Church’s law (the marriage must be legal in the eyes of the land where it is performed).

The age divide has created an interesting, colorful marital relationship. My wife, for instance, has no expectation of privacy from anyone.That’s a product of her age. I, on the other hand, get all bent out of shape by the Orwellian surveillance that we’re subjected to in the “united” [sic] state [sic]. She also was shocked that she could be so young and so sick from hemorrhoids. And now that I’m pushing 40 she doesn’t quite get or believe the arthritis pain that I have under control thanks to really low doses of naproxen in the winter. And her youthful optimism and complete lack of realism when it comes to trying to predict the future of politics is a hoot for us because I am a bit more cynical. She makes me more optimisitic and I make her just a bit more cynical. Its wonderful. 8)

We’ve caught plenty of flak about our age differences over the years. For the record, she was 1 week shy of her 17th birthday when we met. She also went from being 21 that day to 18… to turning 18 in a week… to 17… and finally, at about 4 or 5 in the morning (we were talking all night), she confessed to her real age. I freaked out and told her she’d have to wait til she was 18 b/c of the laws. Then, well… we learned about the laws and were able to get married 3.5 months after we met.

It makes a lot of folks uncomfortable and we have come to accept that. Not all of these sort of older man / younger woman relationships are evil. But we weren’t in our 5th marriages, we married each other, still laugh and joke like we’re both 16, and have a very sacremental life with each other.

Her parents – against my wishes – made us pay a lawyer to change her family’s will to leave the land to BOTH of us so that if she were to die then me and their grand children would get the land (about 10 acres in Mississippi). I asked why and objected and they said it was to make sure she stayed married to me and to make our lives a pain if we ever thought of divorce. 8)
 
awsmith1861 said:
We’re from Dixie and in some corners out here its still socially acceptable to marry an older man to a younger woman.
Click to expand...
I think I’m getting old because 32 is not an ‘older man’ in my worldview, even when he is marrying a teenager LOL

I think that your story demontrates that age difference should not be a problem when a relationship is good and has healthy foundations.

Wonderful news about her health. God bless!
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top