I know this is getting off topic from the original thread about my new cardio wanting to hospitalize me but hopefully since I started the thread, it is okay?
Absolutely. It's all interconnected, anyway.
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MeSci @
xchocoholic and @
JAM Thank you for all your kind words re: coping with guilt and this is probably the single most difficult part of being ill.
This is often the case with emotional issues. They can cause so much suffering! But fortunately, these are much better understood than our physical illness, and many ways of working with them successfully have been developed.
So let me see if I can be at least somewhat helpful here.
As Yogi Berra once said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yet when we plan for the future, which we do all the time, we implicitly make predictions about it. Or we just outright make predictions: "This illness is never going to get better." "I will just be a burden to others for the rest of my life." "I will never be happy." These are just a few of the more common predictions PWME make on a routine basis.
Yet if we look at our past, we've been making predictions all our life. How many of them have come true, especially in the way we intended? If we're honest, we see that it's an extremely small number. In fact, if we look at our past history, our predictions about the future often end up being no more valid than random guesses. This is true even when our predictions seem to be "safe".
There's an old Chinese fable that illustrates this:
A farmer was working in his field, when his teenaged son rode up to him on a horse that the farmer had never seen before. The horse was beautiful and appeared to be in perfect health. "Look, father!" said the boy. "I just found this wild horse, and he likes me, and now he's mine!"
The farmer replied, "Could be good, could be bad," and went back to his work.
A while later, the boy ran to the farmer in tears, saying, "My new horse has run away, and I have looked all over, and I cannot find him anywhere!"
The farmer merely replied, "Could be good, could be bad," and went back to his work.
A little while later, a number of horses showed up on the farm, including the original one.
"Look, father!" the boy cried. "My horse just went to get all his friends! Now all these horses are ours!"
The farmer merely replied, "Could be good, could be bad," and went back to his work.
The boy started riding around the farm on his favorite horse. After a while, his father heard him call out, "Help me, father! Help me!" The farmer rushed over to the boy, who had fallen off his horse. "I have broken my leg!", the boy exclaimed. The farmer examined the leg and found that indeed, the son had broken it. "Could be good, could be bad," he said, and he went to the house to get some materials to bandage up the leg.
While he was bandaging the leg, a group of soldiers from the emperor's army rode up. "A war is about to start, said the lead soldier. "We have orders to round up all able-bodied young men and conscript them into the army. Are there any able bodied young men here?"
"No," said the farmer. "There is just my son, and as you can clearly see, his leg is broken."
The soldiers went on their way.
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Gingergrrl, in the case of your husband, there are many possibilities here. Of course, everyone wants a mate who is perfect in every way, including health. But assume for a moment that you didn't get sick. Your husband sounds like a very good man, and to be married to you, I'm sure he must be. So it is only natural that in his situation with his late wife, he would have some unresolved guilt feelings. Did he really do enough for her? Did he do everything he could to save her life? And if that weren't possible, did he do everything he possible could for her to make the remainder of her life as good as it could have possibly have been?
You know how guilt works. So you know that in retrospect, the mind will always come up with things that
could have been done better, that
might have made a difference. This isn't a rational process; it might not even be conscious. But for someone like your husband, in his situation, it is very common.
Now you come along, and on the surface, it's just perfect. Finally, a healthy partner, someone he can fully share his life with! Then you get sick, and it seems like the repeat of a nightmare.
But is it really? These things are always much more complex than they seem at first glance. If you had had this ideal, perfect marriage with your husband, what would have happened to his survivor's guilt, which is usually present in such a situation? It may have faded with time, or not; it's certainly impossible for me to say. But your illness is certainly giving him a chance to work out unresolved issues from his late wife's illness. On one hand, there are all the difficulties involved in taking care of you; these are the most obvious. And they may also trigger memories that he'd rather not deal with. But if you do your best and are there for him as much as you can be, it may actually help him work through unresolved issues dealing with his late wife's illness that would otherwise not have been resolved. And when you do recover (and that's a
when, not an
if), that will help complete a lot of healing issues for him.
Contrast this with what would happen if you were to suddenly disappear from his life. Not only would he be devastated for all the usual reasons, but on a very deep (and possibly subconscious) level, he would see the pattern that women he married always got sick and left him. You could explain to him all you want that you were doing this for his own good and it would make no difference whatsoever; it's not a rational thing. He would just
know (possibly without even realizing it) that his relationships with women were doomed. He might either avoid future relationships, or if this knowledge were suppressed, enter into some but unconsciously sabotage them before they got serious.
Now I started this post with a warning about predictions, and here I am, making lots of predictions, many about your husband, whom I've never even met. So obviously, all of this should be taken with a grain of salt (or two or three). But my point here is that the outcomes I've described are at least as likely, if not more so, than the ones you have been thinking about. This is why the traditional marriage vows encompass all possibilities - good and bad. The marriage you and your husband have is not the one either of you had in mind when you got married, but it's the one you have. The important thing is that you both love each other, and in this you are very fortunate in that such a situation is by no means a given in marriage. If you simply work at being as good a wife and mother as you can be under the circumstances, that will be plenty. Guilt comes from answers to the irrelevant question of "What if?", which deals with nonexistent realities. If you simply deal with
what is, and keep your focus in the present, guilt will have no opportunity to arise. Nor should it; there is absolutely no reason for you to feel guilty here.
(BTW one of the reasons I made such a strong statement about recovery is that my own recovery is continuing very well; I will share the details with you later.)
