You Can’t See What You Don’t Feel
Up to this point I’ve alluded to what my wife experienced with her illness. The truth is, as an observer it’s challenging to understand the depth of her pains. That’s the unfortunate task of the supporter, you have to watch the suffering without understanding it. This is not just a challenge for those supporting but also the sick. There are many times my wife has tried with all her might to help me understand something and even when I think I got it, I don’t.
In the face of illness, symptoms show, so despite feeling like I understood, it wasn’t till my wife’s fingers changed colors and she was bed bound I really woke up to her illness. I’d like to say I stayed awake to it as well, but the truth is, once we got through the first phase and she began to live a somewhat normal life again the blinders returned. Where she was pushing symptoms down, as she considered them a normal part of life, I found myself refocusing on the normal stresses of life. I knew this sickness wasn’t over. I knew there was more to do, but I wasn’t seeing the symptoms she was ignoring, because the truth was, she didn’t want to see them either.
She’d been fighting for a year to get proper medical care and she was ready for a break. She was ready to focus on life and not sickness. So we moved our family to St. George for a job and she got a job as well. This was our desert of denial. We had made some adjustments with her diet, and she was on medication that assisted with some of her difficulties, but we both knew this wasn’t over. We just wanted it to be. The desert was much longer than it should have been. We addressed some issues as they came up, but as much as I hate to admit it we lost focus on just getting her help.
I take on a lot of the blame, after all it was my career choices that continued to move us around. The truth of it though, we both fell into denial. She didn’t want to feel what she was feeling so she pretended she didn’t. I focused more on getting our family some sort of stability so we could again refocus on her health, but we really just didn’t understand how important it was that we address it now. It wasn’t till the end of 2022 we were finally forced into reality. It was then everything we’d ignored became undeniable and as we looked back on our medical road, the undeniable truth had been hidden on the road the entire time.
Jacob Gittins 