Am I Making a Difference?

The time I've taken off from work was to help focus on Terry's health and get it straightened out. After more than five years of vomiting and forcing limitations regarding what we can plan to do and what we can actually do, we need to get this resolved...for all of our sakes.

But even above and beyond that, I knew I also needed a break from my life as I knew it. Work began to feel like a no win situation. For too long it felt like I was shortchanging my family for my job or my job for my family. You can have only one or two major demands in your life that you can commit to, without everything else suffering. Given a demanding job, Terry's health, my health, the loss of my two dads, getting Molly ready for graduation, and a grandmother with COPD who is having additional health challenges, and it's all too much sometimes....

Interestingly enough, this time off has had benefits for both of us. The most apparent benefit of my time at home is that Terry has not been hospitalized while I've been off. That's a step in the right direction. We were at the ER five times in the last six months, and it was wearing on all of us.

So why has he not been hospitalized? Is it coincidence, or has being here made a real and measurable difference to him? I don't know the answer to that. All I know is he has not been sick enough to warrant going to the hospital. That's not to say he has been healthy and well. He's just been healthier and better than he was the last six months of 2009, but again, it's a step in the right direction.

He has another appointment tomorrow (today) with the Internal Medicine Department at KU Med. I'm hopeful we get on the road to getting answers. The pain he is talking about now is more concerning to me than the vomiting had been. Pain is never good....it's your body's way of telling you something is wrong. They seem to be so focused on the retching and vomiting that we never seem to have discussions about the pain. I have a feeling the time has come.