It’s hard.
My wife was a successful health care professional, really busy, and yup, stressed. After our niece’s wedding in early June she went to do some work on her laptop and found she couldn’t type. She knew what she wanted to type, but couldn’t decipher which keys to press.
This went on for a few days, started affecting her speech too. She didn’t want to call in sick, she had a job to do! We went to see the GP, who suggested it was stress. Gave her a sick note. Then she experienced loss of feeling on her right side, and loss of peripheral vision on the right side. I took her to the Dr again, and this time we went to the hospital A&E to be checked out for a stroke.
Hell! I’m 49 she’s 52. A stroke? Really?
Well after 8 hours in A&E we knew a brain tumour was involved, so, no, not a stroke.
In what seemed like 10 very long days we had the prognosis - a left sided parieto-occipital glioblastoma Type 4.
By this time my wife had had expressive Aphasia for two weeks, loss of peripheral vision and mobility impairment on the right side.
We and the family were in shock. We wanted to know more, but answers were hard to come by.
I quit my job to care for her full time.
Our story is similar to so many others, and yet, so personal, so unique. People I’ve met say that what the carer goes through is hard.
I wanted to know what that meant - what I needed to prepare for, how I could make it easier or make my caring better.
It meant, right from the start, things were changing. Quickly. Something that worked this morning, doesn’t work this afternoon. So I’m getting things wrong all the time. And my wife is not shy of telling me this. My wife, who used to be so positive, practical, full of life. Now she seems to spend all her time criticizing me. When she’s at a low ebb (quite often) she tells us that she has nothing.
Oh yes. Very hard.
When she tells me she loves me, I catch myself wondering if she really does, after telling me how crap I am for the last 8 hours. Sometimes she accuses me of not loving her. Tells me “how could you love me, when you treat me like this?”
But I do. I love her.
Oh yes. This is hard.
