{"id":5612,"date":"2013-08-27T01:00:31","date_gmt":"2013-08-27T05:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allandouglas.com\/blog\/?p=5612"},"modified":"2025-04-21T01:56:40","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T05:56:40","slug":"care-in-sickness-and-in-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/care-in-sickness-and-in-health\/","title":{"rendered":"To Have and To Hold, In Sickness and In Health"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Marriage,<\/a>My wife, Marie, and I have had many wonderful times together.\u00a0 We\u2019ve taken trips and gone to concerts and watched movies and just sat on the sofa holding hands.\u00a0 We work in the yard and on the house together.\u00a0 We truly enjoy one another\u2019s company, so we don\u2019t necessarily have to have \u201centertainment\u201d to be happy together.\u00a0 This is what we\u2019ve always considered \u201cto have and to hold\u201d to mean.\u00a0 And we\u2019ve enjoyed many happy, healthy years.<\/p>\n

Marie recently went through a life-threatening trauma.\u00a0 She\u2019d been sick all day, in the evening she asked me to take her to the hospital Emergency Room.\u00a0 Upon arrival they took some basic information \u2013 mostly about how they were going to get paid \u2013 and sent her to the triage room. \u00a0Above the nurse\u2019s desk here is a big sign reading, \u201cPatients are NOT seen in the order of arrival.\u00a0 Patients are seen in the order of severity of their injury or illness.\u201d\u00a0 The triage nurse took Marie\u2019s vitals and gave her a very brief once-over then said, \u201cOK, let\u2019s go.\u201d and rushed her right into a bed in the ER.<\/p>\n

For the next 6 hours a doctor, a physician\u2019s assistant and an R.N. worked steadily at getting her stabilized.\u00a0 When they succeeded and were transferring her to the Critical Care Unit, the doctor talked to us about what had happened and what would be ahead.\u00a0 He said that had she not come in, had she decided to \u201ctough it out\u201d, she probably would not have lived through the night.<\/p>\n

She is home now, but she is home only because while she worked her way down the scale of concern in the hospital, I was there to help.\u00a0 Two of her nurses thanked me for being their eyes and ears and helping with the more mundane tasks like getting her to the bathroom and fetching ice and soda as needed.<\/p>\n

When Marie started feeling better she convinced the doctor that she would be better off at home than in the hospital.\u00a0 And he agreed, since she has a caregiver who can be trusted and can be with her 24\/7 to look after her.\u00a0 If I\u2019d had a regular job to go to, she\u2019d still be in the hospital.\u00a0 As of this writing, she is still very sick and too weak to look after herself.<\/p>\n

Last night after I got her into bed and crawled in beside her, she took my hand and thanked me for being so attentive and taking such good care of her.\u00a0 Not all husbands would.\u00a0 I thought about that as I drifted off to sleep.<\/p>\n

When We Don’t Care<\/h1>\n

I knew a fellow once who was married to a woman who liked to \u201ctease\u201d him with threats of trading him in for a cabana boy.\u00a0 Their relationship was strained.\u00a0 Eventually he developed clinical depression and had to be hospitalized.\u00a0 After the initial phase of treatment his therapist called this fellow\u2019s wife and asked her to come in and participate in her husband\u2019s recovery therapy.\u00a0 She told the therapist in no uncertain terms that she was not a part of his problem and had no intention of being involved in his treatment.\u00a0 \u201cJust send him home when he\u2019s done.\u201d\u00a0 The therapist told this fellow that in all his years of practicing psychology he had never recommended a divorce as part of the treatment \u2013 this case would be the first.<\/p>\n

This is absolutely the worst case of lack-of-concern I\u2019ve ever known, but I have known other couples who were not \u201cthere\u201d for each other when the time came.\u00a0 I feel this is a basic part of a marriage.\u00a0 And it never occurred to me that I\u2019d dump Marie in a hospital or convalescent center if I am able to do what needs to be done.\u00a0 She is my wife, my soul-mate, I love her dearly and cannot imagine my life without her.\u00a0 I\u2019ve enjoyed the healthy times, why would I refuse to care for her when she needs me most?\u00a0 She will get better, this is short term.\u00a0 But even if not, I\u2019d be here for her.<\/p>\n

I do know people who are in the same situation and of the same opinion\u2026 some of them have been for many years.\u00a0 I like to think that this is the \u201cnormal\u201d response from most human beings.\u00a0 But lately I\u2019ve run into too many cases where this was not the case to believe it to be as common as it once was.<\/p>\n

Just one of many is an elderly couple who lived down the road from us.\u00a0 She developed Alzheimer\u2019s, he was getting pretty shaky in the health department himself and was worried that if anything happened to him there would be no one to care for her.\u00a0 So they sold their home and moved to a far-away state where they have children.\u00a0 But it took only a very short time to discover that when he died or became too ill, it would be just days before she was in a nursing home.\u00a0 None of their family was willing to care for her.\u00a0 They\u2019ve moved back here now and are building a new house next door to their old one.\u00a0 They said \u201cAt least here we have friends who care about us.\u201d<\/p>\n

It breaks my heart to think that our society has become so convenience-centered that husband\/wife\/children will not take care of one another when needed.\u00a0 What is your experience; do most of your friends and family care enough to care for, or do most think \u201cthat\u2019s why we have convalescent centers\u201d?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My wife, Marie, and I have had many wonderful times together.  We’ve taken trips and gone to concerts and watched movies and just sat on the sofa holding hands.  We work in the yard and on the house together.  We truly enjoy one another’s company, so we don’t necessarily have to have “entertainment” to be … Continue reading “To Have and To Hold, In Sickness and In Health”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[58],"class_list":["post-5612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-relationships"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5612"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21533,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5612\/revisions\/21533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}