>In Sickness and in Health

Some of you will remember my husband’s fairly recent flirtation with X-Treme Illness. The short version is that he had a boil on his arm, went to the emergency room to make sure it wasn’t a deadly staph infection and was given a pretty aggressive antibiotic to clear it up.

As it turned out, he was allergic to the antibiotic and the symptoms started showing themselves immediately, giving him a high fever, chills and nausea. Unfortunately, his doctors thought those were all symptoms of the staph infection (an allergic reaction to the antibiotic he was on is fairly rare) and told him to keep taking his medicine. So basically, he poisoned himself for eight days, at which time his liver stopped working.

That was fun. He was out of work for two weeks dealing with the effects of a bum liver, and that’s when the news station decided to run a story on how sick he was, a story that looked a lot like an obituary, with video of his greatest moments and a shocking revelation that he was fighting a dangerous staph infection. After that, everywhere we went, people stopped him, saying, “Shouldn’t you be in the hospital?! I thought you were dying!” It didn’t help that he was severely jaundiced and had lost ten pounds.

Good times.

Fortunately, once he stopped taking the antibiotic, he started getting better. Sort of. Blood tests showed all of his liver functions returning to normal, but over time, two of them weren’t going down as quickly as the others. And after a month or so, they actually started going up a little bit.

So while I haven’t said anything about it to most of you and we definitely haven’t said much at all about it to the girls, Dennis and I had been quietly freaking out just a little bit over this liver situation. A blood test just before the holidays confirmed the levels had risen a little bit. A test just after the holidays told us they’d risen a little bit more. One more test like that and we’d have to schedule a biopsy and an appointment with a top liver specialist. One more bad test and we’d know something was, well, wrong.

We went on with our lives, of course, but it was as if a thin, gray film of worry had settled over everything. Dennis and I bickered more often. I found it harder to concentrate. We had to watch our expenses, knowing that if he were to need a biopsy and more follow-up appointments, even with insurance it would be expensive. We went on this way for five months, hoping for the best but preparing ourselves for the worst.

During this time, I confided in two separate acquaintances who were asking more of me than I felt I could give. One had offered me a small, work-at-home job, the other had e-mailed me repeatedly because I had forgotten to put up her Perfect Post Award nomination from a month earlier. I admitted to both of them that Dennis actually still wasn’t better and that I was really struggling to stay on top of my duties and deal with the stress of his health. It was hard for me to get around to anything extra, and I thought they should know the reason for that. Neither of them have spoken to me since. The Perfect Post woman even “de-friended” me on a social network. While I was disappointed, I can’t say I was surprised. The fact is, we tend to keep longterm bad news to ourselves because we know in our hearts that most people just don’t want to hear about it. I do have wonderful friends, fortunately, who’ve asked about Dennis repeatedly and offered their help over and over again. That’s enough for me. It has to be.

Last week, Dennis was finally scheduled for another blood test. And this time, thank God, we had good news. Four of his six levels had returned to normal and the two that had begun to creep back up were down by half. This convinced the doctor that Dennis’s liver was indeed healing itself of the damage. No biopsy was needed. No liver specialist would have to be called. For the first time in nearly half a year, I could exhale.

There are no guarantees that we’re through this, of course. There never are. I’ve written about this fact before and the realization that I appreciate life so much more after going through this with my husband. I still feel that way today. I can say that I look at each member of my family every day at some point and feel so grateful that they’re with me, and that they’re okay. I try not to worry about the future. I try to live in the present and focus on the friends and family that I have, not on those that I wish would step up to the plate. I am very, very lucky.

This post originally appeared on Parents.com.