My Story, Continuation....( Long)

[kiakaha44]

To continue...

I have been reading the posts on here. I find that I keep being transported back to "the day". This may sound like a journal entry, but I do keep a journal...and it has helped me tremendously just to get it out.

I found a grief website about 2 months after my husband passed. It was my rope in the middle of the storm. At times I poured my heart and soul out, and others I could only read and cry. It was good to find that I wasn't alone, but I can't say it dulled the pain any. I am reading that some of you found work to be a release and help to you. I found it was just the opposite.

I went back to work about 2-3 weeks after the funeral. It has been the undoing of me ever since. I work in a dental office, trying to put on a good face and comfort patients while I was dying inside, it left me drained of any emotions, ans anything else. I think I need to give a little history here:

This job I had...I started in 1998...it was to be my "retirement job", as in=never leave, put down roots, etc. My husband was a retired Marine of 20 years, and we settled in this area. He almost immediately went into severe depression and stayed that way for 2 years. Neither one of us knew what hit us. Yes, he saw pdocs and had medication, but nothing seemed to help. As a result of his depression, his health became compromised. He ended up in the ICU in Feb. of 2000, the night before my birthday, with bilateral pnuemonia, underscored by ARDS( adult respiratory distress syndrome), something I had never heard of before. He was as close to death as he had ever come; stayed on a ventilator for 2 weeks there then was medivacedd to another trauma center 2 hours away.

While there he suffered a mini stroke and was never the same after that.

I am trying to make this short, really.

He had huge memory loss problems. The doctors told me that if he hadn't been so young(41) and in relativly good shape from being in the marines he would not have made it. This major illness helped in the depression dept. soemwhat, as he was not as depressed as before he went in the hospital. I switched pdocs and found a better one for him, but he was also by that time on his way to major addiction to ativan and xanax(anxiety meds). He recovered enough to somehow(and i really don't know how) to land a job as a teacher in a school for deveopmentally challenged children. During that time of respite from our troubles, he started limping real bad. To cut this down--he had avascular necrosis of both hips(his hips had degenrated) due to the massive amounts of steroids given to save his life in the hospital. He would need 2 complete hip replacements(he was now 42). Having those bad hips deteriorated him faster than anything I have ever seen. He was like an 80 yr. old man. And because of the pain involved, was totally addicted to the anxiety meds, and was now abusing them. Here is a man that should have been dead many times over by now, as he started getting into many vehicular accidents, yet noone but me ever tried to stop him from driving.

He had his first hip replacement in June of 2002, that went well, but he developed secondary pnuemonia as a result and was rehospitalized. We knew he was at high risk from the ARDS. When he was released again, he was home 2 days and then his sutures ruptured and I found him in the hallway bleeding, he said he didn't want to wake me. Back to the ER we went. That was July 4th.

He healed sufficiently to return to work and the hip was helping him walk upright at last. Then we saw just how bad the other one was and decided to go ahead and schedule it. I went into work that Monday( Aug. 19th) and told the front desk girls to block me off of work at a certain time, etc.

I went home for lunch and found him in our bed....he was warm....and cold....how is that possible? ( he was 43)

When I say I ;lost my mind that day...I did.

After all he had been through, and the will he had to somehow survive...he had a heart attack.

I read on here someone wrote that every minute or second someone is shreiking NOOOOOOOO!!!

Yes, they are. I wrote an entry in my journal about that day...I called it "the knowing". I wrote about how I kept hearing this howl, like from an animal...I didn't know it was me.

I wrote about how when my son came from whereever he was( i still don't know who called him), and ran down that hallway...I heard him howl...and I answered it.

Back to the job...these co-workers of mine, and my boss...had been through everything with me for 4 years, and they were stunned. I couldn't have asked for a more loving second family than all of them. For 17 months I have struggled to work. I made it 5 days in a row only once in all that time. And I have never made it on time. I have missed so many days that I have now quit my job and applied for disability. My boss refused to let me go, even though I threw my job at him many times over. You see, throughout all those years, somehow I made it . But when Jimmy died, the association with the job, and the lunchtime routine, came to a forefront.

My pdoc treid to tell me I had issues with it, but I was in denial. That almost cost me my life.

By the time Christmas came along I was at my lowest point ever. I had excluded everything and everyone from my life. I wanted to die. And I tried.

I caught myself before anything happened, and the fact that it came about so suddnely scared me mor than anything. I wasn't afraid of death, I was afraid that if I took my own life, I would never see my husband again.

That is when, come the first week in Jan, this year. I was in the shower getting ready to go back to work and I broke down. I couldn't do it one more second. Not one more. To have to try and battle the despair and the trying to get there and them calling looking for me , that viscious cycle i had been in...no more. I couldn't do it one more second.

That day I checked myslef into a hospital and got some serious help.

While there I realized that I could no longer return to work, that my focus on trying to get there and the related stress and repitition of that little drive to and from work, reliving that drive every day---it was keeping me from moving forward. It was the biggest weight lifted off of me in years.

Do I have money? No. I have filed for bankruptcy..I have no other choice. Am I moving forward? Yes....finally.

I know this is terribly long and I apologize. But you see, we were in the middle of our lives--and it stopped.

Everyone has a story to tell, and this is mine.

Reading these posts has triggered this "outburst" because of all the fresh pain I see. Its amazing to me that in just a split second I can be transported backwards and feel the pain as fresh and as real as they do.

This is why I write, this is why I tell my story over and over and over. Every time you revisit it, another little piece comes to rest...and the healing continues.

[kiakaha44]

I don't know if i can remain a member of this board.

Since I have come here and been reading all the fresh grief, seems

like I have started sliding downhill again.

I am being selfish, but I don't want to go back to that

pain again; there may be other factors involved, but I don't think I have

the energy to fight the dragon that lives in the abyss anymore.

I thank you for allowing me to come here.

I have some more healing to do obviously.