Tell HN: Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas!

My wife almost died early this year from a hospital deciding to rush her Sodium level restoration because beds were scarce and profitable. She now suffers from extreme anxiety, her previous life as a happy, well-balanced mom is over, and as I write, she’s in the next room chattering in nonsense to herself because it’s how her brain copes. It’s worse in the mornings, gets better, briefly, in the afternoons as she gains more higher-level function, until her loss and grief for that overwhelm her, and she reverts again.

I won’t go into the litany of pain and suffering she continues to go through, suffice it to say she has had a variety of terrible-to-observe, worse to endure, symptoms throughout the year. Screaming in agony for hours, in first or third person, in hospital or at home, when painkillers just don’t work is not an experience anyone should go through.

The highlight of today is that a friend has invited us around for an Xmas meal. It’ll be our first social engagement since it happened, so there’s some risk. It’s at 4pm, which is usually her best time of the day, so we’re hopeful things can play out “normally”. I guess we’ll see, sometimes you have to risk things, just to make progress. I don’t think my friend actually realises just how much it means to us what his family have done, but I am so grateful that I cried on getting the invite. It can be hard to struggle alone.

So again, take heart. There is always something worse that could have happened, even for us. Don’t let the past dictate the future - you can’t change the past, but you can influence the future.

And I will join you in hoping that next year will be better.

[edit: thank you all for the kind wishes. Xmas has been hard so far because the sense of loss she feels is so much stronger than normal, but we live in hope]

I’ll follow you.