Valentine for the Hepcat

Today is Valentine’s Day, which to my wife, is the most important holiday of the year. It is followed in importance by our wedding anniversary, but our anniversary is clearly in second place. It is more important to her to affirm our love for each other than it is to celebrate our marriage. After all, before we were married we were in love with each other and if we had not formally married, we would still be in love with each other and probably together as well. Neither of us can really figure out too many people who would have been able to put up with either of us for this amount of time and still be happy about it.

Over the years, we have had our crises both major and minor and have had times of strain in our relationship. Adding long-term, serious, contagious disease to the relationship however, throws a real wild card into the mix. Did one of you infect the other? If you did, is the other person able to handle that news without breaking the relationship? If not, does how the infected person get the disease break the relationship? Does the thought of possible infection so distress the uninfected person that they can’t handle continuing the relationship? Does the infected person wallow in guilt and self-pity? Does the uninfected one withdraw emotionally? Does the relationship break down with mutual recriminations and anger? Does the situation bring on support or rejection? All these and dozens more questions and problems crop up when you add a disease like Hep C into the equation of your relationship.

My wife responded in the most positive way possible. Since we had both had bouts of risky behavior in our lives (some when we were together) neither of us could point fingers at each other. To be fair, the finger pointing would have been one-way, as it turned out that only I had Hep C. My wife’s concern once we knew was entirely to discover what the disease was, what having it meant, and what were the long-term and short-term ramifications as far as my health.

She has been incredibly supportive. She has done research on the disease. She has helped with understanding and attempting to deal with the symptoms of the disease. She has come with me to important doctor’s appointments and brought her own questions and taken extensive notes about the responses we have been given. She came to the meetings about the drug trials I tested for. She assists me, now that the trial is going-on with injections and general record keeping of both dosage and side effects. She is constantly urging me to rest and not push myself to exhaustion. She tries to keep me fed and watered, though with my life-long erratic eating habits, that is an almost impossible challenge.

In short, I don’t know where I would be right now without her support. She is the most important part of my treatment. If I were alone and dealing with the exhaustion, emotional swings, depression, aches, pains, insomnia, nausea and all the rest of the mess, I do not know if I would be in remotely as good shape as I am in and I do not know if I would be nearly as successful in keeping up with the treatment.

Doing the blog was her idea and she would love to be contributing more often than the couple of posts that she has managed. There is something about not having enough time what with her two jobs, both with local non-profits, her part-time volunteer assistance to yet another non-profit and the job of trying to keep track of me and my health that gets in the way of contributing as often as she would like. Her heart has always been bigger than her time.

So, happy Valentine’s Day sweetie. I can’t imagine being with anyone else and thanks for all the love and support over the last 30-odd years. I hope we stay together for a long time to come and with the help of RG-7128 aka RO5024048 it will be time spent healthy. I love you.