I'm Just the Wife

Rather matter-of-factly my husband laid it all out for me: His numbers have doubled. He needs an MRA to check for an aneurysm. He need additional bloodwork. He has to switch to a no salt/low salt diet. He has other dietary restrictions. He has to decide what type of dialysis he wants. He doesn't know when he will start dialysis. Soon. I had successfully denied the presence of this thing, this disease , for eight years.  If I even bothered to think about the disease, let alone dialysis, it was always in terms of an eventuality, something that would happen in the future . I never considered that each day, each week, each year was propelling us closer to that reality. This, in spite of my husband telling me over the years that he had lived longer than his grandfather, that he made it longer without serious complications than both his mom and his uncle, that he's lucky, I still thought of this as something belonging to the future. When the realization that ...

Eight years ago I met a man with polycystic kidney disease, otherwise known as PKD. Six years ago I married him. When we met there was that  something different  something about him that you've either heard happily married folks talk about, or that you've experienced for yourself. By the time we had gone out a couple times, I knew. This person was going to be my forever. I barely knew him, had barely scratched the surface of who he was, but a voice I felt, rather than heard, told me this, or rather, he , was it. About the same time I was doing all this knowing and feeling, which I know sounds totally bizarre, he dropped a bomb, "I have a disease called PKD. My grandfather had it, my mom had it, my uncle has it, and I have it." My immediate, internal reaction was, "but of course you do. I mean, of course the guy I'm meant to spend the rest of my life with with has an incurable disease." My outward reaction was something like a slow, "okaaaaaa...