I met my husband Paul in June of 2009 in Marburg, a small town in Germany, where we both attended a Buddhist seminar. Being from Germany originally, I had been living in the small town in the south of Germany for many years, whereas Paul had come from Dublin in Ireland to join the weekend course. I think Paul and I would probably never have spoken to one another, if one of the lectures during the seminars hadn't been given in German rather than, as would have been appropriate for an international audience, in English, if Paul hadn't been seated behind me and if I hadn't turned around to offer him a translation from German into English. In the moment that we first spoke to one another, something klicked between us. We spent the rest of the seminar together - and indeed the following week because Paul wasn't due to go back to Dublin for another week. It was love at first sight for both of us. When he had to go back to Dublin, we knew that something very special had happened between us and that something had changed in our lives forever.
As part of my course to become a bilingual secretary in English and German, I had to find a work experience placement somewhere abroad. Needless to say, I asked Paul if he could help me with finding one and if he would like me to come to Dublin for the duration of the work experience (two months in total). Not only did he say yes to that, but he also had a work experience placement for me in his own company. So this is how, in September of the same year, only a couple of months after we had first set eyes on each other, I arrived in Dublin where I would spend the next two months with him.
Paul told me about his Prostate Cancer very early on in our relationship. At the time when we met, he had already been living with it for 6 years and had been treated with first line and second line hormone treatment. We didn't speak about his cancer much because it wasn't something that we needed to pay attention to too much in daily life. The only reminders of the disease were the three-monthly hormone injections and the monthly blood tests at the hospital. And, each time, we were delighted that they turned out to be okay.
Actually, what was very interesting for us and everyone involved in Paul's care to see was that his PSA levels (the levels of the tumor marker for Prostate Cancer in the blood) went lower and lower during the first months of our relationship. To me this was, and still is, a very strong indicator that our psychological well-being plays an important role in our physical illments; in other words, my thinking was that because Paul was happy and excited about a new relationship and had hopes and expectations for the future his PSA levels improved.
Our first two months together were wonderful. And at the end of the two months we knew that we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together. This is why, on completion of my bilingual secretary course the following summer, I left Germany and moved to Ireland.
A lot of good things happened to us in the first couple of years of our life together. I found work here in Dublin. Paul's job was going well. We had to move house a couple of times but always found lovely apartments and even a small house. We did lovely things together such as a trip to the Aran Islands in the West of Ireland, a holiday in Crete and visits to my parents and brother in Germany. But the main thing: Paul was well and his disease stable under the third line hormone treatment.
