My Husband part II

Hello dear reader.

I kind of left you hanging with my last post about my husband. I told you I’d give you more of the story the next day. Obviously, that didn’t happen, but I’m here now.

Refresher… Tim and I met at church and spent two years getting to know each other and building a friendship before we got together. Now I think you’re all caught up. Ready to continue? Here we go:

When we told Ali, our priest, that we we’re seeing each other she gave us an assignment. Tim had to cook for me and I had to let him. For most people, that wouldn’t be a big deal, but Ali knew it would be a challenge for us.

First of all, Tim doesn’t cook. He survived primarily off TV dinners and pizza. The first time I looked in his freezer, the only thing in it was an elk leg. Yes, you did read that right.. the leg from an elk, fur and all. One of his friends was a hunter and would save the legs for Tim’s big (100 lbs), beautiful dog, Sampson.

The other reason it was such a challenge was I love cooking and I normally would have been cooking this for him, not the other way around. I’m also just a tiny bit of a control freak in certain areas of my life, and cooking happens to be one of them.

But we did it out of love and respect for Ali. So I sat in Tim’s living room and he cooked. I was hearing things banging around and ‘not nice’ words coming from the kitchen. I can’t begin to tell you how hard it was for me not to go into that kitchen! Eventually, I was presented with a steak dinner with mashed potatoes and green beans. Surprisingly, it was good!

We decided after several months that it was insane for us to be paying rent and utilities on two places when we were together every night either at his house or mine. So we rented a very small house together. Poor Sampson had to back out of anywhere he walked. There wasn’t any room for him to turn around.

I had my first Chiari decompression surgery 9 or 10 months before we moved. I was working three jobs (the General Store/Post Office, cleaning houses, and cooking one of the community meals at the church) when we moved into our house together. Within a month, the surgery failed and I was in worse shape than before. I couldn’t function at all. A good day meant I had made it from the bed to the couch. All of a sudden it was all on Tim. I told him several times that this wasn’t what he’d signed up for and I’d understand if he wanted out. He reassured me that he wasn’t going anywhere.

Eventually (almost a year later) I had another brain surgery. This one was much more invasive. When it was all said and done, they had removed 12 cm from my skull, the C-1 and C-2 from my neck, and cauterized the back of my brain so it wasn’t pinching off my brain stem anymore. They placed a plastic mesh of some sort to hold my brain in place.

I know it sounds like I’m going of on a tangent, but I’m actually not (for a change) this time. I’m trying to express what Tim ended up dealing with very soon in our relationship.

That surgery took about two years for me to recover from. I had to re-learn so many things. But Tim was beside me holding my hand through it. It was as hard for him as it was for me. The woman he fell in love with, his friend, had vanished, in her place was a stranger. I had him to lean on. He was on his own with it.

Once again, this has gotten long very quickly. I won’t keep you waiting so long for the next part.

Until next time…