‘I just thought that life was hard’ (Fall fundraising)

We’re digging our way out of the hole.

Earlier this year, my wife finally got the surgery she had needed for more than three years. (Never, ever come at me with a defense of America’s health care system that criticizes Canada or the UK for having “waiting lists.” I do not believe in violence, but if you suggest to me that American health care is better because it doesn’t have “waiting lists” I will hit you.)

The procedure worked. The pain and threat of recurring infections went away and she was getting back to normal.

Sort of. We didn’t expect her to leap right out of the hospital bed and be back to 100% the next day, but despite the enormous relief now that the pain was gone, she still wasn’t getting “back to normal.” Her recovery was taking a long time and we were starting to worry that this was just how it was always going to be from now on.

Happily, her doctor soon figured out why.

It turns out the fatigue that had her sleeping most of most days ever since her stint in the ICU two years ago was not entirely, as we all thought, a response to all that pain and infection.

She also apparently had Lyme disease — undiagnosed because, the doctor said, it was “hiding behind all that other stuff you’ve had going on.”

Eli Yudin has a great bit about this in his “Humble Offering” stand-up special:

You guys ever do that thing where you just have Lyme disease for six months and you don’t know about it because you just thought you were tired? … I went to the doctor for something else and while I was there I mentioned to him, I was, like, “Hey, I sleep a lot. Is that a problem?” And he was like, “How much do you sleep?” And I was, like, “Well, you know, I like to get a good solid 12 to 14 — just sort of a 50-50 consciousness split.” … And he was like, “Are you tired and fatigued all the time?” and I was like, “I just thought that life was hard.”

My wife finds that bit hilarious — much funnier now after her long regimen of doxycycline worked its magic and she was finally, by late summer, back on her feet and finally, actually, “back to normal” with the energy she used to have way back in the before times prior to this whole multi-year health saga.

We take turns quoting that line to one another — “I just thought that life was hard” — and giggling with relief and gratitude.

Life was very hard for her (for us) for quite a while there. And of course, for all of us, in one way or another, it always is.

What’s hard now is digging out from the rather deep hole we’ve wound up in as a result of our two-income household getting by (mostly, sort of) on just one income for the past several years. And that one income was sharply reduced due to her losing her job, and thus her health insurance, and us needing to put her on my employee plan, which is pretty good but also clearly priced to discourage us from including spouses in our coverage.

We’re finally headed in the right direction, rebuilding the second income with her not just getting back to work, but getting back to work pain free. And it’s a great relief, of sorts, to look at the bills and realize that, for example, this month’s mortgage payment is, at last, the only mortgage payment we currently owe.

The relief of that is, alas, qualified by not knowing how we’ll be able to manage paying it.

And so I am turning again to the wonderful people who have carried us through the worst of the past several years and I am holding another fundraiser here.

My PayPal link is here. I am also on Venmo as @George-Clark-61.

If you are able and willing, we would deeply appreciate whatever financial help you can provide at this time.

Thank you in advance for that generosity. And thanks to everyone, again, for all of the support you’ve provided to this blog, to me, and to my family, in the past. A few years ago when my wife was in the ICU in a coma and our house was headed to a sheriff’s sale, the readers and supporters of this blog were a lifeline providing hope and help when we truly could not have survived without them. It’s been a long road and it’s a long road back, but we’re getting there.

“I just thought that life was hard.” But thanks to so many of you, it’s not as hard as it seemed.