Today I am feeling a bit reminiscent! My dear husband is turning 40 in a few days and as I think back over our years together it is an adventure. We are very basic & simple people – one of those couples that are actually much alike, both laid back and fairly quiet. Thankfully we tend to compliment each other – but that doesn’t mean there haven’t been bumps in the road. The strange thing is that all of our bumps aren’t marital or relational, they have been circumstantial, financial or physical. Let me explain . . . .
Other than a bout with Asthma as a child I really never had any physical illness or problems outside of the norm growing up. My eyesight was bad, but that was life. About 18 mos after we got married I began to have problems seeing out of my right eye – come to find out I had a detached retina at the ripe old age of 22! I would never have imagined such a thing would happen to me in a million years. That ended up in my first surgery ever to repair my eye and help prevent it from happening to the other one. Little did I know at the time but this was the beginning of a long list of health issues and surgeries for both of us. Oh, and a week after my eye surgery I found out I was pregnant with our first child!!!! But I won’t get into it all today – LOL!
The one thing that stands out to me the most – because it was truly very scary for me is the time many years ago that Dear Hubby was having the health problems – we aren’t talking about aches and pains or anything like that either. Trying to keep this very simple and detail free – keeping it clean for the audience heehee – we ended up going through about a 6 month process of wondering what was wrong to cause him to bleed. They checked him for hemorrhoids for a few months before finally sending him in to see a GI doctor. This doctor did some of the same “in-office” procedures that the other doctor had done and finally decided after a bit more testing that he needed to have a colonoscopy.
He was only 32 years old – we had been married for 6 years and had 3 very young sons! I don’t think I even knew what a colonoscopy was yet. But we proceeded forth . . . he followed the procedure to clean himself out (SO fun) and we showed up for the procedure. When the doctor came out to give me all of the details he said that he was quite surprised to have found a 1 inch polyp in his colon. He said that it was off to be tested to make sure it wasn’t cancerous but not to worry since ones that large in someone so young are almost always something they call a “juvenile” polyp – or one that has been growing slowly over many years.
Well, about a week later we got a phone call from the GI doctor telling us that it was actually a pre-cancerous polyp and that he was very surprised by this finding. Because of that Dear Hubby would need to have another colonoscopy one year later. This was truly a blow to us emotionally. That may sound funny, after all we hadn’t known it was a crisis until AFTER the coast was clear, but we needed to process it nonetheless and it was tough.
Since then he has remained clear, but still has to go in for a colonoscopy once every 3 years. We remain to get a bit anxious as one approaches and can only pray and trust God who knows our situation and how desperately our 6 young men need their father’s influence (not to mention my sanity!).
I will wrap it up now by saying how very thankful I am for my wonderful husband and the gift I was given in him! He is a wonderful, respectable, honorable, hard working man and I would be more than thrilled if our sons follow his example and are anything like him in his ethics! He is a Blessing and I am happy to spend the rest of my life with this man!