I know this is probably the wrong time year to post this but just felt I had to let it out. This may be a bit long winded too and for that I am sorry….
I joined this site back in June or July….so this could be some kind of record. For some time it was enough for me to just read other people’s stories [to remind me that I’m not alone and that others are suffering worse than me], and to feel the love and compassion people seem to share on here.
But now….I thinks it’s probably due to Christmas which I’ve never been a fan of but which my wife loved, probably because she was happy that she made it through another year.
You see in some respects it wasn’t too hard for me…or I didn’t think it was. I met my Jo 17 years ago and as soon as our relationship got ‘serious’, she sat me down and told me that she had…..well, it was a long list of medical problems and I won’t go into them all but they were all based around a really weak heart which caused other difficulties like her blood either being too thick or thin, and she had her pacemaker. She wasn’t entirely disabled – she held down a full time job, but couldn’t walk very far and got out of breath very easily. She’d had a stroke at 18 and almost died within her first few months of being born. And she was told that she probably wouldn’t make it past 30.
She told me that the only other guy she’d got close to ran a mile after being told this and I wasn’t going to do the same. I said I wasn’t going anywhere. I’d been out with some horrid women [not offence intended to the ladies on here!] before Jo so she was like an angel to me. I always knew that she would die way before me. And that she probabaly wouldn’t make it past 30. But as it turned out she did make it past 30. And 31. And 32. I won’t say that I became ‘blasé’, but I often did find it hard to believe her ill she really was.
She was in and out of hospitals all her life so I was used to this existence. But around 35 years of her age, the visits became more and more frequent. She had lots of things like mini strokes and faints and operations to change her pace maker over to a stronger one and repair a hole in her heart, and it became harder and harder for them to maintain her proper blood level with the variety of pills she had to have [four different pills every night]. However, every time she pulled through, and I became almost of the opinion that whatever happened, she would continue to do so. She made it to 39 and the hospital visits continued, she still kept pulling through but she would often mention her possible death, talk of me finding ‘somebody else’ if she dies [as if!], find sad films unbearable to watch etc, as if she had a feeling that she would die this year.
Well, of course the final time she didn’t. June this year she had a mini stroke and an ambulance rushed her to our local hospital, then to London, a specialist hospital she often went to. She was in there a week, things got worse and worse, and two days before she died I myself almost fainted and the same night dreamt that I was walking through places we liked without her. These two things told me that this was it. She would die soon. I was partly prepared. She died of a heart attack, most of which I witnessed. The last thing I ever did for her was to pour some tea in her mouth she asked for. And then that was it.
Everyone seems to say that I’ve been coping well. And I suppose I have, because Jo prepared me for her death so many years ago. I have friends and hobbies [I'm 46]. But the last few weeks have been hell….which is I’ve been working every hour under the sun that I can…I know I’ll feel better in a few weeks but it’s so hard....probably the hardest it's been since the couple of weeks between her death and her funeral.
