End of September. I was just starting to feel better, just starting to get my appetite back. Just starting to drink more. Just starting to feel like normal married couple again. I’d gotten into work early one morning. I suddenly had excruciating lower abdominal pain. Is my appendix bursting? Do I have a bowel obstruction? What was going on? I went into the women’s locker room sat down on the bench. I walked around. Nothing that I did seemed to help. I went into my office and paged my husband who was on call. I curled up in a ball on the floor in my office.
He called me right back. I told him what was going on. He was rounding in the emergency room on a patient but he told me he would be right up. When he came up he saw the agony I was in. He assessed me the best he could and to see what he could do for me. I ended up in the emergency room where he came down with me in between patients. It turned out what was wrong was that I had kidney stones. One of them was larger than the others. I went home that day with waves of pain every time the stone moved. My husband seem to be in sync with me and what was going on. And appropriately caring. Little did I know, he did not.
When the waves of pain came it felt like razors through my body . It was almost like no pain I’ve ever had before. When there was no pain I was fine. One of those nights I lay on the bathroom floor in so much pain from the kidney stone crying and pleading that I wanted to die the pain was so bad. I was throwing up, in a heap. I had tried some pain medication and anti nausea medication that I promptly threw up. My husband seemed beside himself along with me; I was so desperate the pain was so bad. The only respite I seemed to find from the kidney stones was laying quietly in bed with a heating pad wrapped around me with Tylenol and ibuprofen in my system. Little did I know that that physical pain was so much less than any of this emotional pain that I’ve been going through.
I lay mostly in the dark contemplating how lucky I was that I had my husband to be taking care of me throughout this time. My mother came over during the day to check on me while he was at work. I tried to get any sort of nourishment in me but my appetite was slim to poor. Whatever sort of gains I had made with my appetite were gone. I just kept pushing fluids. That’s what my job was; that would help the stone pass more quickly.
After a few days of being at home with these waves of pain becoming less and less, I decided it was time to come back to work. Laying home just waiting and waiting for that kidney stone to pass wasn’t doing me any favors. I found myself just wondering and wondering what was really going on at work. Is my husband really letting me know what’s going on? Is he really at work as he said he was? He appeared to be appeared to be being honest. But I didn’t know. Waiting for the stone to come seemed similar to waiting to go into labor. Why take all the time off before the baby is born? Work would help the stone pass. It seemed like wherever it was right now was more comfortable and the waves of pain were more tolerable.
Upon my return to work, I was aware I wasn’t quite my normal perky self, but still a little under the weather. I’d been laying at home for days barely moving, going some days only from bed to shower and back. I did try to make it downstairs everyday. By the time my husband got home everyday, I had made it downstairs, even if it nearly killed me. I would make it down there even if I only lay on the couch.
That first day back at work, everytime I went to the bathroom was a chore. I had to strain my urine in case I passed my kidney stones. Doing it at home wasn’t such a big deal because I could leave the things out in the open, but at work it had to be an ordeal to get them out to use them. With the increase in fluid, I was obviously peeing a lot more too, so it just seemed all the more annoying. I just wanted the stupid stone out. It was uncomfortable to sit, but nothing like the pain earlier in the week.
As luck would have it, I passed that stone that first day. I guess I just needed some gravity to help me. The relief that came with that stone passing was immense. I hooted and hollered with joy. I ran down the hall to show my husband the stone I had just passed. I couldn’t believe that such a little thing has been causing me so much pain. When you actually think about how big the stones are with the size of your urethrae; they are huge. Similar to giving birth in a way. I guess this is why they say it is equivalent to men giving birth when they pass stones.
I think it was that night, was the first night I was face to face with what a jerk my husband was being behind my back. I had his phone. One of the things he had start doing was leaving his phone upstairs when he worked out. He had been looking up Honeymoons in Fiji while I had been laying around in pain, writhing from the kidney stones. I was in shock. I know I had choice words for him. I left the house. I took his cell phone. I took the house phone. I left the house without knowing where I was going.
I ended up at my friend’s house that night. I stayed for a few hours. I know there was other damning stuff on his phone that night, but that is the only thing I remember, that he was looking up honeymoon in Fiji. While I was laying on the bathroom floor, crying in pain from my kidney stone, he was in the other room daydreaming about this other creature of a human being taking my husband away from me. All the while, assuring me still, everything was ok. That he was there for me. That he loved me. What was wrong with him? What was wrong with me? How could I be believing him? His lies? I knew how. He has this gentle eyes that when you know him, you know how to read. It just seems he can’t hurt a fly… yet here he was, breaking me… demolishing me to my very core.
That night, for the very first night we slept apart. Rather, we went to bed in separate places. I did not sleep. When I got home I wanted to sleep in the basement. I couldn’t, he had already staked his claim there. So I set myself up in one of the kids rooms. I learned that their doors don’t lock. So I barricaded myself in there like I was a child with furniture holding the door shut. I was not afraid of him. I was afraid of my feelings and the alarming rate they were coming. My mind was on overdrive. I didn’t know what they all meant. Until a month ago, I was a happily married woman. Now I didn’t know what I was and what anything was in my life anymore and what anything meant. I lay motionless in the bed listening to the sounds of the house. He tried only once to come in and he couldn’t. My barricade worked.
After many hours of not sleeping, I went down to the basement and talked at him, like I would one of the kids. I let him know what I thought what he was doing was wrong. I let him know how badly it was hurting me. He did what he always did when we discussed anything deep at that point in our relationship; he curled up in a ball and covered his head up. He said little to nothing. He ran from this conversation like he was trying to run from our marriage. I didn’t know what to do. I tried to stay calm, but I am sure I wasn’t. I pointed out the obvious hole in masterful magic life he was making for himself- that he didn’t like heat. A honeymoon in Fiji would be hell for him. Little did I know that this was going to be one of the first pieces of him “reinventing” himself for her coming forward into my line of view.
Just a week prior him and I had discussed buying a greenhouse to install off the back of the house. We were gathering information for the best kind to have; where the light was best in the yard. We had ordered hundreds of dollars of bulbs to plant for the spring and raised beds. All I kept thinking about was how did we go to that to him back to sneaking around again? Such a delicate thing as building a glass house in the yard, kidney stones, and now him not knowing again? Who was this man pretending to be my husband? Did he even know anymore?
Never had a white picket fence 