Dedicated

A dear friend said I inspire her. She said my dedication to my husband and to taking care of his health is inspiring. That was truly an awesome thing to say and lifted my spirits. I don’t feel inspiring at all. I feel tired, stressed, worn out, and sometimes resentful.

With the hand problems my husband has, he has a lot of problems keeping his food on the fork (or spoon) and with personal hygiene. Short of cleaning him myself I’ve opted to just clean up after him. It is tiring to clean the toilet and floor as often as I do and to check every shirt for stains before they’re washed but I’ve accepted that it’s something I must do. I do it because I love him and I know he’d do it for me if the roles were reversed.

Dedication is really a term that more closely describes him. Dedicated is the man who gets up to go to work more days than not, even when he’s in so much pain that he can barely stand for his hands to rest on anything. Dedicated is the man who has no feeling in his feet except the pain that’s a constant reminder that he has severe peripheral neuropathy – but he puts his shoes and socks on anyway (well, actually that’s something I do for him). Dedicated is the man who adopted the children of another man and raised them as his own, making no differentiation between his biological children and them. Dedicated is the man who held emesis basins, cleaned rooms that had been vomited in, and changed clothes from more than one attack of diarrhea (kids will be kids). Dedicated is the man who brings home his paycheck (or has automatic deposit) and trusts his wife (that would be me) to pay the bills and take care of the household. Dedicated is the man who shopped for groceries for two years because the wife (me again) didn’t feel like going to the store because of panic attacks.

So, I guess if I’m dedicated to him during his “bad” years it has to be because he was so dedicated to me during his “good” ones. He could have left, but he didn’t. I could leave, but I won’t.