The Wedding Anniversary

It’s a difficult time for the world and America, but it’s also a challenging time for me personally.

June 11th marked the 47th anniversary of the day my husband Tony and I got married.  And when the EMT people took him to the hospital sixteen months ago for what turned out to be a mini-stroke, they asked me, “What’s your relation to this man?” (they don’t want to make assumptions—you might be the daughter, the sister, or you might look like his aged mother but only be the wife!). “How long have you guys been married?” “Too long to leave him,” I joked.

Our life together has had a lot of good in it, even if things weren’t always easy. But for the last couple of years our life together has been so difficult. Tony’s been battling a progressive neurological disease, for which the doctors say there’s nothing to be done, except for trying to manage a few symptoms. He lives with this every day and it’s difficult to find hope. So when I woke up today and said happy anniversary, he scowled, as if there wasn’t much to be happy for. Not an unreasonable response. He’s depressed and that seems reasonable. Not everything is a pathology.

I’m grateful that we are still here and love each other. I’m grateful that we somehow negotiated a life together, which is more than many people can say. Will we still have another year? What will it be like? For him… and for me? 

On this anniversary, the sun is shining. Clear blue skies, low humidity, low seventies. Exactly the kind of day it was all those years ago when we got married in Connecticut looking out towards Long Island Sound. We have no plans today. The only thing we have to do is go to the podiatrist about the ulcerated diabetic wound on his toe, which refuses to heal. Not what you want to do on your anniversary, but it’s better than the alternative, which is amputation! These days going to the doctor is a project. We need our strong aide Esther to get Tony into his wheelchair, then into the car, then get him out and back into the wheelchair and then into the doctor’s narrow office with its cramped waiting room. The visit went fine, though the doctor said this wound would take a long time to heal …if it does at all. I guess this is called maintenance and not a cure.

“So where are we going for dinner?” Tony said as we were about to leave the doctor’s office. Tony was getting more cheerful just getting out. I reminded him that he’d not be able to go out to a restaurant until he’s no longer confined to a wheelchair. Especially because I can’t lift and transfer him by myself. But a few minutes later we were outside in the warm sunlight. Suddenly we thought, why can’t the three of us just walk a few blocks for lunch on the main street? Sit in a real restaurant for a celebratory meal?

So what if it might be pasta and he couldn’t handle the mess with his stiff, shaking hands? So what if some of the food ended up on the floor, or that it would raise his blood sugar ridiculously high?  I had to just ignore all of that and just let him enjoy the moment. 

Near the end of our meal, my cell phone rang. “This is a representative from Harris and Harris trust. This phone call may be recorded.” Blah blah blah. They had called me a couple of days earlier when I was driving home. I’d told them at the time that we have no account with them, and to not both me with promos. I’d hung up. But here they were again. This time they announced, “we need to collect payment from you for Columbia Doctors,” the doctors we see at New York Presbyterian. A collection agency! Someone from the billing office had sent one of Tony’s many doctor’s bills to the collection agency—a mistake since the insurance had already paid the bill.  But the collection agent said it wasn’t up to her to fix it. They just want the money. I would have to take it up with the Columbia Doctors.

And so I come home, take Tony’s blood sugar (which is of course too high), and start to assemble all those stacks of papers—doctors’ bills, Aetna’s statements of estimated benefits, records of my many previous phone calls to both Columbia Doctors and Aetna—so that I can spend the next hour or so trying to fix this one problem before tackling the next, which is likely to appear in the next day or two.

While I make my phone calls, Tony takes a little nap. But he’s having trouble sleeping--probably the high blood sugar—and now he’s talking and seems a bit delirious. And calling me every few minutes. When I go in, he is angry and mad with me. This is not my husband. “Things are changing,” he says. “I don’t like this.”  You don’t like what? I ask. “I’m not master of the house!”

Well, happy anniversary to us. It’s only 4:30 in the afternoon and we have hours to go.