I’m sorry if this offends anybody, but I am so furious I can barely see to type this.
I have in past posts occasionally referred to my wife and her health problems. In the last ten years her health has steadily deteriorated to the point where she is all but confined to the house. Going out to do anything is a major project, with any plans subject to last minute changes due to how she’s doing at the time we’re ready to go. But the news we just got is the last straw.
Before I go into the latest assault on her, let me give you some idea what her life has been like:
When she was born, there was some complication (she says she was told it was Harm’s Palsy) that left her right arm semi-functional at best. It has almost no strength and she cannot lift it higher than her shoulder.
Her mother died when she was very young. When her father remarried a few years later, her stepmother hated her (partly because she was the image of her mother) to the point where the bitch persuaded her father to have her put in a foster home rather than live with them. Her father died when she was seventeen, and her stepmother even tried to throw her out of the funeral home during the wake.
She hasn’t talked much about her life but I know that she was involved in several Chicago theater groups, drove a cab for a while, and had various office jobs. A relatively non-descript life, from what little she has said, full of the usual joys and sorrows. Then one day she was riding in a cab and when it stopped for a light somebody opened the door and tried to grab her purse. When she didn’t let go right away, he started beating her on the head. And what does the cabdriver do while his passenger is screaming for help? He sits there; doesn’t even turn around or try to drive off even after the light changes. Of course, the mugger was never caught; there was some suspicion that the cabdriver was involved (gee, you think?). As a result of the beating, she starts having blackouts and has to miss a lot of work; her company uses the convenient timing of some scheduled layoffs to dump her without looking it’s related to her illness. This leaves her with no health insurance while she’s supposed to be getting CAT scans and taking expensive medication for her seizures and migraines.
At about this time we met. All right, maybe that wasn’t such a disaster. I was looking to get out of where I was living, she was trying to find an apartment, so we decided to split a two-bedroom to save expenses. Shortly after that, she gets laid off so suddenly she’s living on unemployment and the occasional odd jobs. Of course she can’t get a permanent job because nobody will hire a forty-eight year old woman who can’t type more than 30 wpm and has occasional seizures. Eventually her unemployment runs out, but by this time a friend is able to get her work on a part-time basis as “contract labor” (hourly pay stuffing envelopes, sorting and filing on a flat hourly basis, with no company benefits) which at least keeps her off welfare. Somewhere during all this, our relationship shifts from “friends” to “why don’t we get married” which in addition to the obvious also solves her health insurance problems.
In time the seizures stop and she’s taken off the medication. Unfortunately she then develops adult-onset diabetes and is put on oral medication and told to lose more weight (she had already dropped about thirty pounds in preparation for the wedding). Then the arthritis kicks in on the hands and knees; not too bad, just enough to be an annoyance.
For a few years everything seems to be under control, until in the space of three years she gets hit by:
Diabetic retinopathy, which requires semiannual laser treatments to seal broken blood vessels in her eyes.
Diabetic neuropathy, which causes shooting pains which start in her feet and gradually work their way up her legs.
Sores and blisters on the soles of her feet, culminating in a bacterial infection which costs her half her left foot.
Cataracts, which is complicated by the retinopathy so that treatment keeps getting deferred and when they finally do operate she ends up losing most of her eyesight.
Kidney stones which do not respond to the initial ultrasonic treatment, requiring a second visit which still leaves her with some minor loss of kidney function.
So now she is sixty-eight. She can see just well enough to avoid walking into walls; in order to watch TV clearly she has to sit 4-5 feet from a 32” set, and even large print books aren’t always readable. Reading was one of the joys of her life; she used to joke about how she’d never be able to get through my library. She can walk around the house but going anywhere else requires use of a motorized scooter, and since she can’t see well enough to navigate herself she’s stuck in the house all day with nothing to do but listen to the TV. She used to love just getting in the car and going for a drive, another thing she’ll never do again. Between the arthritis, the neuropathy and the bursitis in her left shoulder she’s in constant pain that can only be partially relieved because of interactions with her other medications.
Lately she’s been having increasingly frequent dizzy spells and loss of balance which has been causing her to fall; she usually can’t get up without assistance, which can be really interesting if I’m at work when it happens. After falling three times in the last week she called her doctor Friday and he told her to go to the emergency room; he would call ahead and authorize a CAT scan. After all the fun and games of checking in and waiting around she finally gets the CAT scan, which shows no tumors or other obvious brain damage. So they decide to keep her for a few days and have her checked by a neurologist.
Today she calls me to tell me the neurologist has given her a preliminary diagnosis.
Parkinson’s Disease.
Fuck, hasn’t this poor woman been through enough? Wasn’t taking away the ability to enjoy everything she liked enough? This is a woman who cried for hours whenever one of her cats died, who paid to have a tombstone put on her father’s grave at the age of eighteen even though he had abandoned her when she was five, and who, when the foster mother who had treated her as little better than an unpaid servant for most of her childhood needed help, moved back in with her and put up with five more years of abuse and controlling behavior.
I’ve heard all the crap about how God isn’t responsible for every little thing, how He provides strength to get through your trials.
Fuck that shit.
And I can’t do a damn thing about it.
That’s the worst part. 
:mad: