New Hope

We heard back from Teds Rukspins quickly.  Just two weeks and two ER visits later, we had an appointment with a doctor at his office in Northtown.  His name was Dr. MK and he was a gastroenterologist.

I went with Heather and her mother to the appointment.  Heather wasn't feeling great but she wasn't having an attack either.  He examined her and asked her a few questions about what had been happening.

The pain from the attacks had been starting to localize around the upper left side of her abdomen and it would sometimes radiate all the way to her back.

He examined her and put his hands on her stomach.

"I believe that what you have is a sphincter of oddi dysfunction."

A what?

"Sphincter of oddi dysfunction.  It's a small valve on your pancreas and when it's too tight, your pancreas can't properly expel the enzymes you need to process food and it becomes inflamed, causing a lot of pain.  The inflammation is called pancreatitis."

If you want to learn more about sphincter of oddi dysfunction (SOD) you can visit Oddi.net.

"The only treatment for pancreatitis is pain medication and obstaining from eating or drinking until the pain stops."

"There are only two ways to test for pancreatitis; the first one, which unfortunately is the more accurate one, we can't do at this hospital.  We just don't have the equipment. The second one requires a specific drug that, also rather unfortunately, there is a serious shortage of right now. So I can't really prove that you have pancreatitis without waiting for the drug to become more readily available."

I think we all held our breath hoping that there was something more.

"But I'm like 97% sure that you do have pancreatitis from SOD. It's not very noticeable unless you're looking for it, but your lipase, which is a pancreatic enzyme, you lipase levels have been just a little bit high on the record of a lot of your ER visits.  Even slightly elevated lipase levels can be an indicator of pancreatitis.  Also, on the left side where your pain is, that's where your pancreas is. And a lot of pancreatitis patients complain of the pain shooting through to the back."

"Like I said, I'm about 97-98% sure that you have pancreatitis and that 2-3% is really just because I can't prove it and you should always allow a little room for error."

"What I want to do is a relatively non-invasive endoscopic surgery where I would open up the sphincter and hopefully put an end to these attacks.  In the mean time I want to put you on enzyme capsules to help replace the one that your pancreas isn't producing."

It was a roller coaster of emotion.

He knew what it was! We had a name for it now, pancreatitis caused by sphincter of oddi dysfunction.  I repeated the new diagnosis over and over again, asking Heather if I was saying it right.  I wanted to be sure that the next time we were in an ER I would remember it and know how to say it.

Why hadn't any of the doctors before this ever noticed her lipase levels? He said that they wouldn't notice if they weren't looking but come on, seriously? Nobody noticed?  And she had been saying for a month that it was on the right and radiating to the back, were those doctors idiots?  How the hell was she showing all of these classic symptoms of pantreatitis for over a month without a single doctor, including two gastroenterologists, ever figuring it out?  I wanted to go slap them all individually for being bad at their jobs.

He was so sure!  How did he get her case anyway?  I guess they assigned it to him or maybe he heard her case in a meeting and thought that he knew what this was.  He seems like a really smart guy.

The enzymes were expensive, but her parents didn't care.  Which was good, because we were broke.  We were both living in our perspective parents homes in the months leading up to the wedding.

We kept getting asked, "Are you sure you guys don't want to postpone the wedding?  Just until she gets better?"

We were sure.

We both wanted the wedding to happen.  We weren't going to let some weird dysfunction with sphincter in the title ruin our lives.

Two days before our wedding,

We drove separately to the hotel where both our families and all of our friends had been directed to stay at for the wedding.  Before I arrived, I got the text.  Heather was having an attack and they had taken her to a local ER.  I checked in at the hotel, left my bags with my parents, and drove to the hospital.

She was crying.  Her parents were sitting by her bed.  Her dad always looked so befuddled, like the whole thing just didn't make sense to him. It didn't make sense to us either.  I remember her mother asking again, "Are you sure you guys don't want to postpone the wedding?"

Heather gave me a look that repeated the question.  She looked scared that I might have changed my mind, and like she'd understand if I had.  I looked back into those eyes that were prepared to be heartbroken,

"I don't care if we have to roll this bed down to the hospital chapel and do it there.  I'm marrying you."

She smiled.

The next morning, the day before the wedding, there was a wedding shower.  Heather couldn't be there, and her family were the hosts.  I went.  It wasn't bad.  Her aunt's, all ex-military as well as ex-girl scouts, had stayed up the night before making campfire starters to go with the theme of camping gear that the shower followed.  There were cup-cakes and future new relatives to meet, and even an awful faux pas in which my future mother in law asked my parents if they were excited about my sisters engagement, about which they had not been told...

It was only awkward for a moment, my parents hadn't been paying attention.

The whole time I was just worried about Heather.  I meant what I said about marrying her in the hospital chapel, it just wasn't my preference.  I had to imagine it anyway, because with every hour that passed with her still in the hospital, the more real the possibility became.

It didn't happen like that.

She was out later that day.  She came to the rehearsal!  We were getting married at this beautiful little property out in the country.  There was this gorgeous willow tree at the edge of the yard that would serve as the background for the minister.  We walked the path and smiled from ear to ear as the minister, a family friend, told us where to stand and how the ceremony would precede.  We had to imagine where my groomsmen would stand,  they were stuck in traffic and didn't arrive until the rehearsal dinner.  Frustrating, but not a big deal.

The rehearsal dinner was great.  Everyone was so happy to be there.  We handed out bridesmaid and groomsmen gifts, an open bar and, by request, no corny slide show.  My future sister in law told my future wife, "He cleans up pretty nice doesn't he?"  She seemed surprised, I wasn't.  I looked good.

The day of,

My heart was fluttering all morning.  It wasn't fear, or jitters, it was excitement.  I couldn't believe the day was finally here.

If you're getting married soon, let me give you a little tidbit of wisdom from personal experience; something is going to go wrong.  Accept it and move forward.  For our wedding, there were, issues, early.

For one thing, it was raining.  It was mid April after all.  This meant that we would have to move the ceremony inside.  Not devastating, just disappointing.  It was a really pretty willow tree.

Secondly, my groomsmen were stuck in traffic again.  They were both broke and so they hadn't reserved hotel rooms for the nigh before the wedding.  They had gone home after the rehearsal and now they were stuck in traffic again. The real problem was,

Everyone was stuck in traffic.

In all of our casual planning we had failed to ever realize that we had scheduled our wedding on the first day of spring break.

The highway was clogged for at least a few states.

When it became obvious that my groomsmen weren't going to make it to the hotel in time to ride in the limo with us, Heather said,

"Well, I'm getting married today.  I'll see you there."  She kissed me and left to go meet up with her bridesmaids/ sisters and niece.  The way she said it wasn't with blind optimism.  What she really meant was, "This is going to be my wedding day one way or the other.  I'm not allowing anything to fuck it up."       I love her so much.

My sister, serving as my best sister, was the only groomsman to ride with me to the wedding site.  She spent most of her time leading up to the ceremony calming me down as I worried myself into a frenzy about the tardy guests.

"Hey! You're getting married today.  That's all that matters."

I choose well when I choose her.

The guests that made it to the hotel in time rode on a trolly to the wedding site.

The next thing I knew, her father was walking her down the middle of an isle of plastic chairs filled with the people who love us the most.

She was beautiful.  I think she was glowing.  We planted forget-me-nots to symbolize our understanding that a marriage needed to be cared for and tended to every day.  We had the tattooed wedding bands that we had gotten a week earlier, blessed.

I was the first to have my band tattooed on.  I told her, "If you're going to change your mind, now is the time."

"No, I'm sure."

"Okay."  The artist started tattooing my left ring finger,

"On second thought...." she laughed.

When it was time to repeat the vows that we had written, I was the one that was crying.  She actually kept it together.

"I've never promised you anything sacred,
but today I promise you this;
I promise you all of my strength,
and all of my weakness.
My hopes and my fears.
My mind and my body.
My heart and my soul.
But above all else
I promise you my love.
I take you to be my wedded husband/wife
For as long as forever can last."



The reception was nothing short of a party.

We danced our first dance to, "Crazy Love" by Adam Sandler.

I don't remember all of the speeches but I remember that over and over again, our loved ones said that it seemed as though we had both married our best friend.  We agreed.

More crying.

Here's a wedding day tip; You want a rainbow for the backdrop of the greatest wedding day photo ever?

All you have to do is put Skittles in the little glass jars that sit on the tables for all your guests, instead of personalized M&M's, dinner mints or candy covered almonds.  That "taste the rainbow" crap from the commercials is no joke.

It was an amazing day.

Everyone that stayed long enough got good and drunk and by sundown the party was hopping.  I saw all of my new aunts, as well as the ones I already had, dance like they were back in college.

My sisters fiance caught the garter.  They were married five months later.

My widowed aunt caught the bouquet.  She married her boyfriend three months later.

It was perfect.

Back at the hotel, before things ensued that are none of your damn business, Heather gave me a pocket watch with my initials engraved on it.  It came in a box that was also engraved.

"For as long as forever can last."




I'd love it if this was the end of the story.  I'd love to end with a happily ever after the perfect wedding.  I'd love to tell you that her sphincter of odi dysfunction was ultimately taken care of.

I really wish I wasn't writing this post next to a hospital bed, while Heather moans in pain for the fifth day in a row.

We Can't Help You Here

I feel that I need to explain what happens when Heather has, what we were calling at that point, "an attack."

We don't know what triggers it. Food was a popular theory for a long time.  The drugs were a candidate for awhile, which never made since because the drugs came after the attacks started.  Stress and anxiety associated with possible psychological issues stemming from childhood trauma is something to consider but in the mean time it doesn't resolve the physical pain issue. We just didn't know.

When an attack happened, it was never expected.  She would get this look in her eyes...

My mom is a therapist and when my sister was a little girl with the chicken pox, our mom guided her through a meditation to try and distract from the itching.  She led my sister through the process of creating a happy place inside the only part of her body that didn't itch, her big toe. She built and decorated her perfect room, a place that she has re-decorated and re-designed several times throughout the course of her life.

The expression of absence and the far off stare in Heather's eyes always looked to me like she had gone into her body the way my sister would go into her toe.  But it wasn't the same way.  My sister meditated to retreat to a happy place in her mind.  Heather was searching her stomach for what might be wrong.  It was a dark place, and in that dark place, searching for something while not knowing what, panic can quickly set in as the pain and the nausea increase.

Sometimes she would get the look and then mumble, "oh shit," and run to the bathroom to vomit.  Other times she would start to wince.  Her eyes would squint shut and the corners of her mouth would curl, revealing her tightly clenched teeth.  She would wrap her hands around her abdomen and hold on as if she were going to explode.  She would start rocking back and forth.

She collected a series of sayings, mantras really, that she would mumble and scream and shout:

"Make it stop."

"Please help me."

"I just want it to stop."

"Why is this happening?"

"Why won't it stop?"

"Someone please help me. Make it stop."

"What did I do to deserve this?"

It was horrifying.  Since I didn't know what was causing it, or how it felt, I would start to get scared that she might die.  I worried that there was some obscure part of some organ that might rupture at any moment.  That's how much pain she appeared to be in.

We never knew what else to do, we went to the emergency room, and we would go to whichever one was closest.  The hospitals we went to her all part of the same, massive hospital system.  For legal reasons, let's call this health care industrial complex, "1-Star."  1-Star had hospitals all over the area.  1-Star hospitals are the only hospitals, they have a monopoly, so if we went to an ER, it was a 1-Star ER.

In the first few months, January 2011 to March 2011, I think I managed to keep accurate count of 16 visits to the ER.  They all tended to go the same way.  First a tech had to find a vein.

"I'm a really hard stick," she would try to explain.  She had learned from all of her surgeries early in life that she has thin, shallow veins that "roll" (move) easily.  This part always makes me squeamish. Something about needles makes my stomach turn.  The tech would nod and say they understood, and often they really didn't.  There were a lot of misses, a lot of techs and nurses that had to go find someone who was better at this than themselves,  needles that were too big, veins that would roll...
After awhile, when Heather was in too much pain to speak, I would be the one to tell them.

"She's a really hard stick.  She has thin shallow veins that roll easily.  You might need to use a smaller needle, a 22 I think."  I learned to quickly tell them that she would need, what I called, "the resident IV Ninja."  Every ER has at least one IV Ninja and everyone who works in that ER knows who it is.  Ask for them by name.

This is when I got in the habit of leaving the room, when they were trying to draw blood and get an IV started to rehydrate her.  I'd go to the vending machines or the cafeteria or out front (off hospital grounds) to smoke a cigarette and call her parents.

Back in her room, the doctor would come in and the conversation with Heather would go like this;

"Say's here that you have sarcoidosis and gastroparesis?"

(Between winces and moans) "Yes"

"Where does it hurt?"

(Indicating with her hands) "Upper gastric."

"Does it hurt when touched?" They always ask as they press on her belly.

"YES!"

"Alright.  Well, all your tests came back negative."

"They usually do."

"Do you think this is your gastroparesis?"  In both of our heads we were thinking, You're the fucking doctor! Why are you asking me/her?

"I don't know."

"I know gastroparesis can cause discomfort, but it shouldn't cause this much pain."

"That's what they keep telling me."

"Okay. Well I'm gonna give you another milligram of Dilaudid and see if we can't let you go home."

This conversation is another one of those things where I've heard it so many times that they all blend together in my head.  Men and women doctors, taller, shorter, older, younger, foreign, native, black, white, middle eastern, asian, compassionate, distracted, overwhelmed, cynical, jaded, polite, and apologetic doctors all without real faces or names of their own anymore.  At least not for me.

They would give her the drugs and the pain would subside and we'd go home.

The Dilaudid left some ugly side effects in it's wake.

On the ride home, Heather's depth perception would be off and she would often suddenly brace for impact as though we were about to crash.  She would gasp, startling me at times, then she would apologize and rub her eyes to try and fix them.

For a day or so afterward, she would be really irritable.  Sometimes she would snap at me about some comment I'd made or angrily scold me for failing to clean something up or put something away.  It doesn't seem that bad, but like I've said before, we never fought.  It was her tone, it would change to have this sound of disgust and repulsion.  When I'd say something about it, she'd shake her head as if there was dust that she could shake off of her brain.  Sometimes she would cry as she apologized and reminded me that the drugs made her feel that way.

So after the visit that got her admitted, when they told her parents that her problem was withdraw, Part of me was excited at the prospect of taking her off the medical grade heroin that was making her miserable.

But she was back in the same 1-Star hospital less than two weeks later, admitted, being given 1 mil of Dilaudid every few hours to try to control her pain.

Her gastroenteroligist visited her in her room.  This was the man that first diagnosed Heather with gastroparesis.  His name was Dr. P.  Dr. P sat in the corner.  He was an older man, thin and smaller than me but even more so because he slouched.  He looked broken to me.  He seemed curled up, like a child in time out.  He just kept shaking his head.  He had essentially come to apologize, he just didn't know what this was.  He didn't know what else to do.  We looked for another gastroenterologist after that.

Shortly after he left, the hospital doctor came in.  He explained that Heather's gallbladder was not functioning properly.  They had noticed it through some scan or test or something like that.  He said that it was only functioning at about 15%.  He couldn't be sure that this was the source of her pain, but there's a good chance that it was going to have to come out at some point in her life, so why not now.

It's called a cholecystectomy.  Say it with me class; Cole-is-ect-a-mee. Good!

The make an incision beneath the belly button and two on your side and teach in with these...well, here:

If you are interested in learning more about the gallbladder and gallbladder removal you can learn more at Gallstones-Treatment.com.

After the surgery, the same doctor came in and asked how heather was doing.  The pain had not stopped.  He told her, "Well, at this point, at this hospital, there isn't much more that we can do for you.  You should probably get a second opinion from somewhere like (names changed for legal ass-coverage) Teds Rukspins up in Northtown or The Ketsup Hospital out in North-mid-west."

Having an entire hospital tell you they're out of ideas and that you should go somewhere else, can be crippling to your optimism. 

The Ketsup Hospital was too far away.  Heather sent a request to be seen at Teds Rukspins and found a new gastroenterologist.

Our wedding was set in a little more than a month.

Nerves and Weddings

I realized that I wanted to marry Heather about three months after we officially started dating.

Thinking about it started innocently enough at first, I realized one day that Heather was the first girl I'd ever dated that I simply couldn't conceive of breaking up with.  As soon as I realized that I didn't want to ever break up with her, I asked myself, does this mean I should marry her?  I thought about it every day for a week before I shared my thoughts with someone else.  My roommate Madelyn.

Madelyn was a unique person, one of a kind actually, never met anyone like her.  She never pretended to be anything that she wasn't and she never said anything other than exactly what she meant and wanted to say.  When I told her that I was freaking out about thoughts of proposing to Heather, the answer she offered me was profound,

"Hell yea dude! Why not? Pussy's just pussy, you guys are great together."

Such wisdom.

After another two weeks of thinking about it every day, I asked a newly married co-worker if her husband had ever told her how he knew he wanted to propose.

"Apparently, if a guy starts thinking about proposing every day, it's probably a good idea."

Did I say every day? I did.

I have a tendency to develop tunnel-vision when I get excited about something I want to do, and when it came to preparing to propose, tunnel vision would be too subtle a description.  I got a couple of diamonds from my grandmother and had a ring designed from a description Heather had given me months before we were dating of what her dream engagement ring would be.  I planned a camping trip with friends and told my family my plan.

After discussing it with my parents my father said, "Just make sure that this is really something you want to do because once it's done it's done."

I smiled and looked him in the eye, "Dad, she thinks it's funny when I fart."

"Marry her son.  Marry her before it's too late.

I spent the whole day hiking and setting up camp with her on the day of.  I kept looking for any reason to back down.  If there was one, I wanted to find it, but she kept being her usual amazing self and again and again I was amazed at how good she made me feel and how happy she looked when I made her smile.

I proposed on the side of a cliff at sunset.  I took a picture.

She said yes.

On the way home from the mountains, after we had spent a whole day discussing the many fun things to think about when first planning a wedding,  there was a moment of silence and Heather became solemn. She asked, "What about all of my health issues?" 

I turned my head to look at her for just a second, (I was driving after all) but I could see that she looked as though she were about to cry.  As if she had just accidentally reminded me of something that might make me take it back.  I had already thought about it.

"And I decided awhile ago that I would rather marry you and live through you dying than be without you or ever break up with you."

We began planning a small and simple wedding that would be in eight months. Whatever problem the male lead in whatever romantic film always seems to have with making decisions about food and place settings and flowers, I didn't seem to have.  Every decision was easy.  Neither of us ever got frustrated with the other and we made it through the entire planning process without ever having a single fight.

Although, to be fair, we never fight anyway.

It was going well.

One night in early December, the wedding still a little more than four months away, the two of us were invited by a friend  to come and judge a karaoke contest that the bar he managed was hosting.

It was a good time.  We were drinking and eating and doing our best to figure out how to judge karaoke (Japanese word for tone-def) when Heather suddenly got up and made a bee line for the bathroom.  I had seen her do this before.  Clearly she had eaten too much and her gastroparesis was making her vomit, but when she came back to the table, she had turned three shades lighter, she was covered in sweat and she had a look on her face of contained distress.  "We have to go," she told me.

Thanks to the wonder of the smartphone, I was able to find a hospital close by and we were in the ER before long.

The vomiting wouldn't stop.  By the time we got her into a hospital bed, she was complaining of sever pain that was being caused by the vomiting.  She tried to explain to the nurse that she had gastroparesis and that sometimes puking for so long can start to hurt.

"Well lets get you something for the nausea and something for the pain."

If I had known then what I know now...

After the nurse gave her some Zofran for the nausea, and morphine for the pain I learned something.  Heather has a very high tolerance for pain medication. "My mom is the same way," she explained to the nurse and I, while continuing to wince in pain. In order to get this under control they would have to take out the big guns.

One milligram of Dilaudid, and she was pain free less than 10 min later.  Dilaudid is essentially the medical version of heroine and I learned that night that if Heather was in physical pain, this was the only drug that would work.  All of the tests and blood-work showed that she was physically fine and so once she she felt up to it, were able to go.  As we left the hospital that night, heather commented, "Well that was weird. Throwing up usually doesn't make make me hurt so much.  That really sucked."

If I had known then what I know now...

On Christmas Eve a few weeks later, we spent the night at her parents house so that we could wake up there for Christmas.  The bedroom was in the basement and I had been upstairs talking with her parents.  I went downstairs to see what was keep her in bed so long.

What I saw is an image that somewhat haunts me to this day.  

Heather was curled up in a ball on the bed.  She was pale.  She had been sweating and weeping and she was shaking ever so slightly. The miserable expression on her face was filled with confusion and fear.  It was the expression was one of horror at the thought that something was terribly wrong.

Another trip, to another hospital, where another nurse, gave her another shot of Dilaudid, before another series of tests came back saying that she was perfectly fine.

If I had known then what I know now...

This all too quickly became an all too familiar cluster of events in our lives.  This pain in her stomach would come from nowhere and quickly lead to uncontrolled vomiting that could only be controlled with a trip to the hospital.  Sometimes it would happen the other way around and she would start vomiting again and again until the pain returned.  Over and over I heard nurses express genuine empathy for her pain.  Each time they would end her suffering with a shot of Dilaudid.  Every shot of Dilaudid would end her suffering and we would leave the hospital trying to figure out what had triggered the most recent episode.

Two other, more curious things happened every time as well: the nurse or doctor would always say something along the lines of, "Gatroparesis shouldn't cause this much pain," and whatever tests they did or scans they took, all results came back negative for any diagnosable ailment.

We were becoming more and more frightened with each episode that there was something seriously wrong with her body that none of these doctors seemed to be able to figure out.

Yet another visit to the Emergency room in early March of 2011 became a turning point in this little adventure.  This time, the pain wouldn't stop after just one shot.  Several doses of Dilaudid were administered, but her pain wouldn't stop.  After awhile they decided to admit her to the hospital. 

I had a moment of hope.  I thought that maybe admitting her would lead to a more thorough investigative examination into what was going on inside my fiance's stomach.  I was getting more and more concerned that there was some organ or blood vessel that would explode and kill her at any moment.  I was sure that she was just one insightful doctor away from being cured.

My dream of a quick and accurate diagnosis from a brilliant doctor is still... it's still a dream. 

The doctors were sure that they already had their diagnosis, narcotic drug addiction.  

Hours after she had been admitted through the ER, Heather was writhing, moaning and screaming out in pain from her hospital bed while squirming and kicking as though she way trying to get away from her own stomach.  They were not bringing her any more pain medicine, despite her many cries to, "Make it stop!"

When her parents came and saw her in this state, I learned something about my future mother-in-law.  While I tend to assume that the nurses and doctors are doing all they can, she tends to light fires under peoples asses.  She became the squeakiest of wheels until a doctor finally came to speak with her.  We weren't married yet, and so I was asked to stay in the room while the doctor spoke to her parents in the hallway.  Maybe I shouldn't have, but I listened in by the doorway.

When Heather's mother asked the doctor why her daughter was being left in screaming convulsing pain.  The doctor answered, "There's nothing wrong with her.  This is narcotic drug addiction."  Their assertion was that the dozens of ER visits over the course of 3 months with even more Dilaudid injections had caused her body to develop a physical addiction to the drug.  The withdraw was the cause of this attack.  The doctor echoed the cry of many that had come before her, "Our tests show that there's nothing wrong with her."

I want make sue that I point this out because having the events spread out over a much longer period of time caused me to miss this little flaw in the doctors logic.  How can Dilaudid be the cause of her pain and vomiting, if she was having attacks before she was ever given Dilaudid?  And if addiction was a concern with this drug, why the hell were doses given to her freely and repeatedly like lollipops for children with boo-boos?

It got worse.  The hospital sent down a psychiatrist to talk to her once she had calmed down a bit.  The psychiatrist suggested that it was all in her head.  She asked questions about what had been going on in her life, and when Heather told her that she was getting married, this woman, suggested that the stress of the wedding was probably what was causing all the problems.  

Heather's delicate and overwhelmed emotional state was probably the cause of her pain?  What a crock of shit.  There was no stress!  Heather was no bridezilla.  Every decision had been simple and nothing about this wedding was scary for her.

This hospital couldn't find out how to fix her or even prove that she had anything so they had come to the conclusion that the woman I love must be a drug addict who can't cope with the stress of her wedding.  

Of all the sexist, ignorant, presumptive, degrading, dismissive, personal ass watching...

The true battle for Heather's health and life had begun. Our enemies and our allies were one in the same.

80mph Backwards

     I often feel that in some ways our romance developed in reverse.  It also progressed with a speed often reserved for romantic comedy cinema.

     For example, less than two weeks after I came to realize that I was in love with Heather, before we were ever intimate, before we categorized what we had as anything other than a friendship, I told her that I was in love with her.

     Blatantly and without fear or shame because I couldn't let her go without having her know.

     We were on the phone.  She had called me with a soft, low, melancholy tone in her voice to give the bad news.

     She was thinking about moving away, back to Texas.  She felt that the constant reminders of Ryan and his betrayal surrounded her both mentally and physically.  She didn't feel that there was anything for her here, living in her parents basement.  She was calling me because I was one of the only people/things she would miss once she was gone.

     I didn't even consider censoring myself, "Well, I don't want you to move away because I've fallen completely in love with you."

     The silence that followed was horrifying, and seemingly infinite.

     Honestly, I don't remember exactly what she said next, just that she eventually spoke.  I know she did her best not to discourage my feelings, without fully reciprocating.  She told me that she cared about me a lot and that she also had romantic feelings for me.  The problem was that she was still dealing with her feelings about Ryan, specifically her feelings of mistrust.  She wanted to have something more with me, she just wasn't ready. She did make the point again and again to say how good it made her feel to hear that I loved her.

    While blurting out my unfiltered feelings didn't springboard us into the next phase of our relationship, it did accomplish one thing.  It stopped her from moving away.

     We kept spending the same time together.  Hanging out, watching TV, bullshitting, all the time with my professed love floating in the air like weightless pink elephant in the room that everyone sees but nobody minds.

    It was a glorious emotional torture.  I was single, in love with my best friend and unable to act on those feelings.  I had sworn off other women.  The few women that I had been pursuing, dating or sleeping with had been passively avoided to the point of almost complete abandonment.  Almost. I had been pining over Heather for so many months without any progress, beyond professing my love.  The uncomfortable and unavoidable doubts and fears that this romance would never happen were weighing on my mind heavily by the time Halloween rolled around.

    Halloween had become my roommate filled household's only annual party and this year there was to be no exception. We all invited everyone we knew.  It got a little crazy, as it always did.

    Heather showed up late, in a hospital gown.  She had been to the ER again to stop a fit of vomiting.  She was disappointed, but she went with what she had and appeared at the party as a patient.  I went a little crazy that year and went as a demon by painting my upper body and sticking rubber horns to my head to be a demon. My roommate Madelyn set up a portrait studio in the garage to take pictures of party-goers in their costumes so I'm able to show you that together we looked a little something like this:

     Halfway through the night, Heather wanted to change to also be a demon, then we looked like this:

     Part of me thought that something was finally going to happen between us.

     It didn't.

     Instead, I ended up with a beautiful redhead in my bed the next morning.  Her name was Megan and she was a woman I had been spending time with/ confused about/ trying to date.  There was a definite attraction between us, but she was really adverse to any serious or committed relationship at that point in her life.  She was one of the aforementioned women that I had distanced myself from since realizing my feelings for Heather.

     Heather had gone home the night before, after all, she had already been to the hospital that day.  I was drunk.  I had been wondering if Heather would ever be ready.  I was emotionally and sexually frustrated.

    And Megan was the sexiest Freddy Kruger I had ever seen.

    Nothing happened.  We shared a bed and there was some light kissing the next morning, but nothing else, despite my best efforts.

    I told Heather about it (we were just friends after all) and she seemed a bit shocked, but not much.  Little did I know, having Megan spend the night had changed everything.

     Less than a week later, Heather came over to watch the Redskins / Cowboys game.  She had grown up in Fort Worth and she was a fan of Marion Barber, which unfortunately meant that she was a Cowboys fan.  I have lived just outside D.C. my whole life.  I've met Joe Gibbs.  Jeff Bostic used to go to my church.  I'm a Redskins fan.  This rivalry had become a passionate ongoing joke between us.  On this particular Sunday, Heather had worn her Cowboys PJ bottoms.  We were in my room after the game and when I turned my back to her, she put on my Redskins shirt, while STILL WEARING her Cowboys PJ's!

   I didn't understand why she would do such a thing. (I do now).

   I told her that she was wearing my Redskins shirt with a tone that matched my awe and confusion.

   "What're you gonna do about it?" she asked with a smile on her face.

   It was on.

   I leaned in a kissed her deeply.  What followed was the most intense, passionate, hungry, sensual and violent sexual encounter of my entire life.  My hip joint hasn't been the same since.

   It turns out that Megan spending the night had forced Heather to realize that if she wasn't with me, someone else would be.  She didn't want to miss her chance.

   It would be another week of contemplating before Heather agreed to, "be my girlfriend."

   I proposed eight months later.

  So the progression went like this; We spent every day together for six months, I told her I was in love with her, we had our first kiss, followed immediately by "sleeping" together for the first time, then we started, "dating."

80mph backwards.

Little Black Dress

     By the summer of 2009, Heather had begun to move on with her life without Ryan.  She needed something to do and theatre had always brought her joy.  She found out about a dinner theatre in a town about fifty miles south of where we lived and she auditioned for "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat."  She was cast in the role of Potiphar's wife.

     She had a friend that she had known at the run-down dinner theatre she had worked at with Ryan who lived near the "Joseph" production.  His name was Josh.  Josh lived with his parents in a farmhouse and he offered Heather the houses guest bedroom to stay in during the week while she rehearsed for the play.

     While this meant that she would not have to commute 100 miles everyday, it also meant that we would be spending less time with each other.

     There was no official or even unofficial romance between the two of us, but there was something.  No interaction between us could be considered flirting.  We had never shared any awkward moment with the urge to kiss in the air.  There was a looming ghost of a romantic future that haunted our daily lives together that was never seen or heard but merely sensed through subconscious intuition.

     I began to realize how much I truly cared for her.  I knew that she had given me no indication that she would be ready to pursue romance any time soon and so I continued to try to contain my feelings and keep them to myself until the time seemed right.

     Because we had grown so accustomed to speaking with one another every day, we often spoke on the phone, just to talk.  After about a month, the phone no longer held the same satisfaction, so Heather asked if I would come visit her for a night.

     We returned immediately to our routine of watching TV and smoking cigarettes as we had done for so much of our close friendship up until that point.  When nighttime came, Heather asked if I wanted to stay the night.


     She quickly followed up the offer with the strict condition of no physical affection.  I wouldn't be getting any that night.  I must admit that I was disappointed, but I had been controlling my attraction to her for a few months at this point and the opportunity to simply share a sleeping space still seemed like a step in the right direction.

     As we got in bed together for the first time that evening, I made a truly innocent request, "Can we spoon?  It's not a sexual thing.  I just really like the creature comfort of snuggling."

    She said that it should be ok, as long as I wasn't planning on, "trying anything."

    As soon as I cozied up next to her, with her back held softly against my chest, we realized something immediately.  We fit together perfectly.  We weren't just two spoons stacked atop each other in a drawer, we were two spoons molded by the same smith to be equal parts of one set.  I draped my arm over her and asked if it was ok.  She said that it was.

    We slept the whole night through in that exact position.  Neither of us stirred.  Neither of us even moved.  My arm was still wrapped around her as I woke up.  I hadn't slept that well in months.

    By the end of the summer, as her play reached the point of opening weekend, my crush on Heather had grown and intensified to a point that was making me think about her a lot.

     I went with Kyle to see her play after it had run for a week.  I wanted to give the cast a change to work any kinks out before I went to see it.  I was nervous, because as a recovering actor myself I have a tendency to be overly critical of theatrical productions.

    Heather had told me what her costume looked like in the show before I ever saw it on stage.  For lack of better description, it was essentially a gold sequin bikini.  It was sexy.  When she appeared on stage my head became full of purely sexual thoughts about the woman who had been one of my best friends for the better part of six months.  I realized in that moment that my sexual attraction to her was far more intense than I had been aware.

     It was a different outfit, her "after-the-show" outfit that really ended up changing my world.

   I waited with Kyle as well as her parents in the parking lot after the show.  I was trying to explain to Kyle how much more I felt attracted to Heather after seeing her in the gold bikini.  I felt like my mind had been blown.  That was when I saw her again.

    Heather was walking on the sidewalk towards us from behind the theatre.  She was wearing a the little black dress...

     Ladies, you know what I'm talking about.  THE little black dress, the form fitting one that's not too short and not too long and can be worn to almost any formal occasion.  The cocktail dress.

     The vision of her in that little black dress overpowered the memory of gold bikini in an instant and I found myself standing in that parking lot with my mouth agape thinking;

I'm in love with this woman.

   That thought never went away.  It only grew stronger as time went on.

Snowpocalypse

     Heather would call me or I would call her after I got off work around four o'clock or so and she would come over to my house.  She moved out of the apartment she had shared with Ryan and rejoined the "MovingBackInWithMyParentsForAWhile" club.  All of her other friends were friends and co-workers with Ryan too, and she needed to get away from all that. Being with me was her only real escape from that life.

     I'd also like to believe that I was good company.  We would watch TV together and miss half of the shows with the distractions of our own commentary.  She would stay and eat dinner with me, sometimes I would cook sometimes she would pay for pizza.  And sometimes, she would have to go and throw up.

    She had to explain to me that she have developed a new condition called Gastroparesis.  Literally translated it means paralyzed stomach.  While the average human stomach digests food in an hour or so, the stomach of someone with Gastroparesis might take four to twelve hours to digest the same meal.  Sometimes the food that's been eaten goes bad inside the stomach and it has to be regurgitated.

     You can learn about it with medical terms at http://digestive.niddk.nih.gov/ddiseases/pubs/gastroparesis/

     She had developed this condition shortly after she started dating Ryan and I had seen her less and less.  She had lost a lot of weight from it and she was not quite as curvy as she had been when I first admired her in geology class.  She told me later that she had been at her biggest when I first met her.  By the time she and Ryan broke up and we started spending every day together, she had lost almost fifty pounds.

     I still thought she was hot.  Just a skinnier version of the same hot girl I had met years earlier.  I told her I was attracted to her and that I would love to volunteer for any newly-single sexual experimentation that she might be planning to help get over Ryan.

     She told me, "I don't want to just sleep with you.  Right now any sex I have needs to be with someone I don't care about.  If anything is ever going to happen between you and me, I would want it to be a real relationship that I can take seriously and I'm not ready for that right now."

     While it was disappointing to be denied sex, I really liked her answer.  I hadn't even really thought about dating her.  As soon as she suggested it, being committed to her sounded like it would be... good.  I kept it always in the back of my head as something that someday would be.

     Late February 2009, about a month or so after Heather had started coming over every day, a snowpocolypse was headed for Virginia and most of the east coast.  The news warned us for days that three to five feet of snow was about to fall out of the sky and shut everything down for days.  My roommates and I went grocery shopping and prepared to be snowed in.  Hours before the snow began to fall I spoke with Heather on the phone and she said she'd rather be snowed in with me than at her parents house.  The beltway was glazing over with snow as I rushed back home after picking her up when my Jeep spun around five times before gently bending the front fender on the highway barrier.

   Remember, always turn into a spin, or at least try to remember.  I sure as hell forgot.

   Anyway, we spent a few days together, snowed in at my little communal home in a suburban cul-de-sac.  While we had shopped for food, we had also become bored with what we had and searched for alternatives, to stave of boredom more than hunger.  I offered Heather a Cup-o-noodles which she promptly ate.

    What I had failed to warn her of, was that that Cup-o-noodles had been sitting in my parents laundry room for at least a year before I had pilfered it for the snowpocolypse.

   She got sick.  Very sick.

   She threw up in my bathroom for over an hour until she was just puking up stomach acid.  She told me that she was going to need an ambulance.  She quickly explained between heaves that sometimes the vomiting just wouldn't stop on it's own.  Her body would just get stuck in vomit mode until she received IV nausea drugs.

  Getting an ambulance to come pick someone up when there is four feet of snow on the ground in a cul-de-sac is not as easy as it sounds.  They sent an ambulance first.  The driver didn't feel that he'd be able to get turned back around if he came all the way down our un-ploughed road.  A second, smaller vehicle was sent out to come down to the cul-de-sac, pick Heather up and bring her an eighth of a mile back down to the intersection where the ambulance was waiting.

   A cluster of EMT's came into my house and were led to my bathroom in which Heather was haunched over my toilet as she had been for a few hours.  Amid the questions and explanations of sarcoidosis and gastroparesis, Heather lightened the mood by speaking to one EMT in particular.

     "Your fly is down."

     "It'll be ok," he clearly hadn't heard her.

     "No, you.  Your zipper is down."

     The EMT's, my roommates who had crowded the doorway to observe and I all laughed as the tall and brawney man with the shaved head tried to shake off his embarrassment while pulling his zipper back up to the proper position.

     I think we all laughed because we wanted the situation to be lightened.  There is a strong desire to find humor in a situation caused by medical ailment. I found later that when the situation does not offer any humor, the desire to find it becomes even stronger.

    The gurney wouldn't work in the snow and the EMT's had to half carry, half walk Heather out to the van-like-ambulance, which took her to the full sized ambulance, which took her to the ER. The whole transport took about an hour all together.  She was given IV fluids and nausea medicine and I made the perilous drive several hours later to come and pick her up.

   We agreed that the year-old Cup-o-noodles was the obvious culprit and Heather vowed never to eat Cup-o-noodles again.

   Along with the desire to find humor, serious medical events also inspire you to unprofessionally diagnose the event as a fluke, something caused by unique circumstances that can easily be avaoded in the future.

    Unlike the desire to find humor, when a diagnosis can't be dismissed as a singular fluke, the desire changes to hope.  Hope that a professional diagnosis will be attainable.  Cup-o-noodle persecution becomes nothing more than a misguided memory.
    

Closed door, opened window.

     It was January of 2009 and I had woken up that morning with a sad errand on my schedule.

     My pet bunny Pebbles had passed away and I needed to go bury her in my parents backyard.

     I had named her Pebbles because that's what she made in my hand when I first held her.  Her companion Bam-Bam had died only a month earlier and I think that loss, along with the move to the new house, somehow caused her to simply stop living.  I only moved to the other side of town from my parents house and I had a small pet cemetery in their back yard in which Bam-Bam had already been put to rest.  I had to do it that day because Pebbles had actually died a week earlier and my roommates were starting to complain about the dead rabbit being kept in the freezer.

     I had just loaded the deceased into my Jeep when my phone rang.  I saw on the caller ID that it was Heather and when I put the phone to my ears I could tell immediately that she was crying.  My first thought was, "Aww, she's crying because Pebbles is dead."  I had done some crying over it myself, after all.

     My second thought was, "Idiot, she's not calling about your bunny.  How would she even know about it?"  We had not spoken to each other for a few months.

     I eventually found the clarity to be responsive and I asked her what was wrong.  It took her a few deep breaths and sighs before she could get it out.  Ryan had been cheating on her.

     Not just regular cheating either.

     She had been with Ryan for almost two years.  They worked at a little dinner theater and had acted in several plays together.  They had moved in together, gotten a joint checking account, a time share in Florida and two cats.  They had spoken seriously about marriage and jokingly referred to each other as husband and wife.  The entire time they had been together he had been cheating on her with the same person, Casey.

     Casey was more than just a mildly moronic blonde with big tits, she was a stripper too.  When she wasn't working as a stripper, she worked as an actress, in a little dinner theater, with Ryan and Heather.  Her vanity was right next to Heather's and they had sat next to each other every night for almost two years, and Casey had been sleeping with Ryan behind Heather's back the entire time.  Casey even had her own boyfriend named Craig, whom she had married.  Heather and Ryan had been invited to the wedding.

     The affair continued past the wedding until one day when Casey had a big, blow-out fight with Craig and told him she had been sleeping with Ryan purely to hurt him.  She told him that she and Ryan were in love and that they had plans to leave Craig and Heather so that they could run off and get married.

     Craig had sought out a shoulder to cry on and ended up pouring his heart out to a woman who had met Heather and Ryan at the wedding.  When this mutual acquaintance asked Craig if he had informed Heather that she was being similarly betrayed, he answered that he didn't know how.  So this woman took it upon herself to call Heather and be the bearer of bad news.

     Of course all she said over the phone at first was, "Ryan's been cheating on me."  She explained that she was at work but she couldn't focus and needed to leave but she was too upset to drive.

    It took me a few seconds to realize what she really needed, "Do you want me to come pick you up?" I asked.

     The answer was yes.  As she had sat there at work having just found out that her committed relationship was a lie, she realized that all of her current friends were also co-workers at the little dinner theatre.  She knew that the story would spread through the troupe with true theatre gossip speed and that it would not be long before everyone knew.  She had needed a friend that wasn't a part of that world, and I had been the first person she thought of.

     I picked her up at work and through streaming tears and sniffled sighs as she got in my Jeep she said, "Nice car."  It was new (certified pre-owned) and I was delighted that she was able to notice and comment on it, despite her emotional state.  I played the "I Will Survive" cover by Cake off of a newly burned CD and drove her to come hang out with me at my house while she told me the story that I've just shared with you.

    We ended up spending almost every day together for the next six months.