The Blog of mamapolo

My husband is better each day. He is better enough that he often thinks he is more capable than he is at present, and he is returning with frightening rapidity to his independent and self-reliant stance, which has stood him in good stead over decades, but which is now dangerous to him.

If I leave him to go fetch water, or go to the bathroom, when I come back he's getting out of bed. If I take him to the john and carefully instruct him to holler when he's done - he stands up and slips, striking the tap handle for the shower nozzle near the toilet, showering himself and the bathroom.

It is not unlike having a teenager, one who thinks she is both savvy and immortal, when her mother knows she isn't. The difference is that one's teenager rather expects to be hollered at - one's husband does not.

I started to read him the riot act today, but then I was overcome with fear for him and dissolved in choked-back tears instead.

He was very quiet for a long time and then he said in his still-tracheostomy-damaged, whispery voice, "The little blonde from PT was saying today that I was really lucky to have you for a wife." He paused and then said, "She called you a tigress." (I do not recall having any tigress-like encounters with anybody from PT.)

I said, "I only want for you to be patient long enough to get better and come home. If you fall and hurt yourself again, I'll just crawl up into bed next to you and let what happens happen. I'm losing it, honey. I can't fight you and everything else, too."

His raspy small voice continued. "I told her, yes, she's right. I couldn't live without you. I WOULDN'T have lived without you. I want to thank you for all the sacrifices you've made for me."

Sacrifices? He thinks these are SACRIFICES? I got mad.

"I am not sacrificing ANYTHING. The job, the hairdo, the sleep - they are nothing. I look like crap, and I'm sorry about that, but oh well. It is your health that is my concern, and my only concern. But you have to stop bucking me at every turn. You are not as smart as you think you are."

He blinked. Not as smart as he thinks he is? He knows I think he's the smartest man I've ever met.

"You do NOT know more than the nurses, and the therapists, and the doctors, and at this juncture, you do not know more than me. YOU'VE been somewhere else - on a beach in Cancun, at the races in Kentucky, bounding about on the moon - for most of this past month and a half. I'VE been here, studying every ailment, googling every damn word, making notes, asking questions. You have got to trust me."

He sighed, started to argue, then stopped. "Okay," he said.

We'll see. I should've married him about 25 years ago. I'd have him trained by now.