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.
No comments:
Post a Comment