After The Hospital

After giving us the bad news, it seemed they couldn't get me out of the hospital quickly enough. They had to wait till the swelling in my throat from that last test had gone down, and the meds to keep me calm had worn off. It's very scary to have your throat swell closed enough to effect your breathing and lose your voice. I really have no idea now of how many days I was even in the Hospital. I'm pretty sure it was over a week.

When I was released, we couldn't reach W. So my parents took me home where TK was waiting. For whatever time I'd been in the hospital, W had never been back to see me or get TK or even phoned to ask how I was or what was wrong with me. In fact he hadn't even told any of our friends where I was. Till the Thursday I didn't show up for my womans bowling league. I was the Treasurer and my absence without explanation caused a stir. One of the women also bowled with me and W, along with her husband, on our Sunday night couples league. She finally reached W by phone. She and her husband were my only hospital visitors from Knox County. They were also part of our Euchre Club and we'd been close friends almost since I'd come to this county. They were amazed and surprised by W's actions. But all W would ever say was that hospital smells made him sick. I never even got a hint of any apology.

No excuse was ever going to be enough for my parents. He hadn't even phoned. They never tried to tell me I should leave W. They tried hard to keep their opinions to themselves. I still wasn't ready to accept another divorce. I desperately wanted TK to grow up with both parents and not have to go through what JT was experiencing. I hoped that if our lives could reach some kind of normalcy, W and I could still make it work. After all, he was only weak when things were tough. Besides, TK would need his Father if I really did die. (That year the Doctor gave me was going to be a rough year.)

Normal wasn't in the immediate future. We still had a log home to save from Bankruptcy. After learning I couldn't lift logs, and knowing I was facing death if I did, it seemed obvious the only way to finish now was to hire a contractor to finish quickly. We were almost to the roof. Again, W did the unthinkable. He refused to hire help. He wanted to be able to say he built it himself. What on earth was he thinking. I realized he was refusing to listen to anything he didn't want to hear. The same way he'd refused to do anything that upset him. If W didn't like something, he convinced himself it didn't exist or matter. He never would listen or allow me to talk about the aneurysm or that it could still kill me.

We argued about how to finish the log home all that summer, till the Bank started Bankruptcy. Then he blamed me when we lost everything. The debt had grown so large by then, they even took our first house. I never did understand that. Somewhere we had failed to read the small print. I do blame myself for that. We lost both of our properties.

That's when I really started to believe, with everything going so very wrong, I really started to wonder if I was going to die. Till then I thought I could control it if I avoided any of those things that gave me "That Feeling." The stress had made my headaches unbearable. I imagine my anger also contributed to the pain. Now it looked like I wouldn't have as much control over the headaches as I'd had in the past. And, hadn't the Doctor told me it was now a time bomb that I'd weakened with the first aneurysm.