So, remember how Lou’s schmekle used to bleed? Yeah. All that drama…
Well, a few weeks after we moved to Utah, it started to do it again. (I’m sorry I didn’t mention this sooner, but I’m telling you now.) The bleeding wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been in the past — but seriously! As I’ve said before: a bleeding schmekle is never good.
The first time it happened in Utah was right after Lou gave me one of those very special hugs that husbands and wives give each other from time to time. I remember a few hours after our…embrace, Lou came out of the bathroom of our hotel room, and his face was as white as a sheet. I think we both started with the denial phase, and then we tried to come up with some simple explanation for what caused this to happen all over again:
We’d been hiking earlier that day, and the altitude must’ve triggered the bleeding.
We had been spending a lot of time in the car — which we knew wasn’t good.
We were stressed out from being homeless, without income, and, without any insurance again…
All of the details of our current life situation were basically just a different version of the same thing we’d already experienced. And, despite the fact that we’d faced this nearly identical situation almost exactly a year prior, you just never get better at handling the fear that tumbles in with a health scare like this. But we did what we always did: we got practical.
Lou wasn’t bleeding all that much, so we just bought some dude dipes, and we increased the iron supplements.
And. We prayed it would resolve itself.
But instead of clinging to each other to survive the way we had in the past, I can see now that we both retreated. We really started to experience this health crisis as individuals for the first time — even though our mutual survival was still on the line. It’s just that this time, I was so emotionally worn down that I didn’t have the ability to carry what was happening to Lou’s body in the same way that I had tried to before.
Don’t misunderstand me. I was still scared, and pretty much overwhelmed with worry at times for my husband.
