In Sickness and in Health

Okay, so J. and I didn't take the standard American, Christian vows... but less than two months into marriage, and we have already had more than one test of the "sickness" part of partnership. As Joshua is taking care of me today--getting groceries, doing dishes, calling attentively to check on me--I figured I should reflect on this a bit.

As a few of you already know, J. was in the hospital less than two weeks after we got married. Six days after the wedding, he started having neck pain. The next day, Sunday, he had neck pain so bad that he couldn't turn his neck at all. On Monday, J. woke up with a fever. At this point, the Bride insists on his seeing a doctor. Fever plus neck or head pain of that severity equals potential meningitis. For the next few days, we went to multiple doctors for multiple imaging procedures and blood tests.

That Thursday, J. got a phone call from the doctors telling him that his blood culture was forming as-yet-unidentified bacteria and he needed to go to the hospital immediately. So, a quick packing of a bag, and we were off to Stanford Hospital, where J. got the best of care and a lumbar puncture to rule out the meningitis. We were there for just over a day. The bacteria turned out to be an unusual strain of salmonella para typhi which manifested as blood poisoning before showing gastrointestinal symptoms. A day of massive antibiotics took out the salmonella very quickly, but the lumbar puncture left him with an absolutely horrific headache that ended up lasting for 8 or 9 days, and was worse any time he was even slightly upright. (After that, he was fine.)

And--oh, yeah--this all happened just days before we were to leave on our honeymoon. He got home from the hospital on Friday, and we left on Monday for Fiji and New Zealand.

For J., it was a massively stressful, scary, and painful experience; for me, it was massively stressful, scary, and exhausting. It did, however, leave us feeling very close to one another, to review our priorities, and appreciate the wonder of marriage. J. was very glad that he had me to take care of him at home and advocate for him at the hospital. I literally mopped his sweaty brow. For my part, I gained first-person insight into the weighty responsibility of being responsible for another person's health and well-being. The idea that I was now responsible for emergency decisions and even had Joshua deferring to my opinions on his non-urgent hospital care was clearer than ever. And both of us spent a lot of time contemplating how singles living far from their parents--particularly single men, who are less likely to have networks of friends who are willing and able to make the necessary sacrifices of time and energy--ever cope with being REALLY sick.