Where We Go When We Stay

As morning came, the sun peeked over the mountains on the far east side, casting its weak rays across the valley created by the river. She had slept well. Cricket remained burrowed deep under the covers beside her. It was too cold to get out of bed, so she closed her eyes but didn’t fall back asleep.

The friendly dinner with Mariesa’s clients the night before was just the tonic needed to ease her out of her moody funk yesterday. The lingering effect of socializing gave her the reprieve she wanted. But the relief was short-lived. She began thinking again about Gil, but with fewer emotional undertones.

With the forgiveness she couldn’t find before, she thought of Gil’s long-standing health issues and treatment for benign prostate hyperplasia (BPH). He had been under the care of doctors before she met him. The first biopsy of his prostate tissue revealed some abnormal cells that doctors could not rule out as cancerous. The medical professionals suggested a “wait and see” approach.

Gil had continued to receive care at the Sacramento, CA, doctor’s office near his hometown even after he sold his place and moved to her house in Santa Nella. She remembered how he would take day trips for appointments, check-ups, biopsies, etc., and he always saw Carmen when he was in the area. They met for lunch, and on the occasions he needed more involved tests and procedures, he even stayed the night at her place.

Carmen was a PA with years of medical experience. Gil was nervous about what was happening to his health and his body, and was seeking comfort. As a trained professional, Carmen could give educated advice and information, but she wasn’t the only one. It wasn’t like there was no one else in the world he could talk to. It bothered her, Gil’s ex-wife’s involvement.

Gil’s doctor’s office had all the staff one could need. Why couldn’t he get support from them? Why was there always a rational reason for Gil to continue what appeared to be an emotional connection to his ex-wife? Gil didn’t share his health fears and concerns with her. He didn’t even ask for comfort. He always went to Carmen for that. Emotional cheating is cheating.

It was as if he didn’t trust she could be there for him. Gil’s health problems scared him. As his wife, she should have been there to offer comfort. His failure to include her came across as hurtful. Maybe he didn’t trust her because he knew she had a very different approach to all things health and medical. Their healthcare philosophies were not the same.

She believed in prevention and conservative treatments by a collective group of professionals from multiple branches of practice and varied training. She received long-term treatment from integrated health professionals and held strong opinions against Western medicine. Because of their differing sentiments about the medical professionals, Gil dismissed her beliefs almost patronizingly.

It felt like he thought she was just an uneducated redneck who believed in homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic, and why not voodoo? Gil even called her integrated massage therapist a “whackadoodle.”

Of course, she didn’t think they could cure all medical conditions using Eastern methods and alternative medicine. She knew there was room for both views and, when applied in a common-sense approach, one type of practice could help and enhance the other. Gil mustn’t’ve thought it important to see things from her point of view. She knew about the care he was getting and warned him of the downfalls. Gil still didn’t give her credit for having the insight that could have saved him from trouble after recovery from his second biopsy went bad.

It had been several years since the initial invasive exploration of the prostate tissue had been done. The results from the first biopsy revealed that one or two of the tissue samples out of the dozen they took had irregular cells. Her advice was to question the physician’s decision to order the second biopsy after he suffered a systemic infection following the first one. Based on the numbers provided by the blood tests, Gil’s risk that cancer had grown hadn’t increased. The blood work was inconclusive for cancer. She couldn’t see why they needed to go in again a few years later when, other than the size of the prostate, there were no alarming changes.

The preparations for such a procedure — the cleaning out of all material in the gut for access to the prostate — were damaging enough to one’s digestive system. Then there was the probing of an area of the body not accustomed to harrassment; the rectum. Once inside, there is the breaching of the barrier of security between the bacteria-ridden colon and the defenseless interior tissues of the abdomen. Add to that the poking of a needle dozens of times into an organ of the body that wasn’t designed to recover from such injuries. In her mind, that is no way to approach this situation. But it wasn’t her body.

It was her body, however, when she had her uterus and ovaries removed. As she aged, her pelvic floor muscles weakened, requiring surgery to correct a prolapsed bladder. She also had uterine fibroid tumors that were problematic. These things, along with the fact that her mother died in her fifties after getting ovarian cancer, were enough reasons for her to go full medical on her body. No amount of Ayurveda was going to repair her bladder, so while the doctor was there, it made sense to remove the risk she would someday die like her mother did. She had a complete hysterectomy.

If she applied her logic to Gil’s situation, she’d have had a prostatectomy long before any of the resulting side effects of letting the problem go could have come about. But Gil didn’t take as much initiative as she did. Instead, he suffered for over a decade. The entire time she knew him.

He developed chronic urinary retention, with the constant urge to pee while unable to fully empty his bladder. Gil had erectile dysfunction, and it impaired his performance. Adding to it, Gil endured the flushing of his innards and aftereffects on his digestive system prior to exams and procedures. The fever and hospitalization from the infections and the compromised kidney function, and kidney damage when the waste toxins in his bladder couldn’t eliminate poisons from his body. It was Gil’s choice to endure these side effects, but the conditions presented affected them both. Because they disagreed, and Gil stopped involving her and talked to his ex-wife instead, she found it difficult to be understanding.

On the day of his second biopsy, she did not offer to drive Gil the 140 miles to his doctor’s. She reckoned Carmen would be there to ease Gil’s worried mind. Maybe Carmen could advise Gil on how to minimize the strain on his digestive system. Carmen could better explain to Gil the procedure in medical terms than she could, but wasn’t that up to the doctor?

Carmen was there for him, but Gil was alone at home when he ended up with a raging infection worse than after the first biopsy. Four days after collecting the samples, paramedics took Gil to the nearest Los Banos, CA, ER, with excruciating back pain that rendered him unable to stand. The antibiotic they prescribed for the first biopsy had proven ineffective when Gil got an infection. Though they wrote it in his records, the office put him on the same antibiotics the second time around.

The infection was far more dangerous the second time around. The bacteria were more resistant to treatment, and the microorganisms released from the colon got into the bloodstream. Gil had sepsis. The hospital doctor at the emergency discovered the error in antibiotic prescriptions, and they began him on a different protocol. Gil’s body responded to a better form of antibiotic. But because his bladder had been so compromised by the episode, Gil came home with a catheter.

She had never had a catheter herself or seen one on someone. After she had two babies and a few surgeries, she understood discomfort, but she hadn’t dealt with the intrusiveness of a catheter.

Once again, Gil chose the support of his trained professional ex-wife. Following the two-night hospital stay, he and Carmen went to follow-up appointments and visits with his doctor in Sacramento. This time, she didn’t mind the time Gil spent with Carmen. She used it as a reason to excuse herself from caring.

She didn’t realize how she had been changing during that time. Losing trust in Gil when he ignored her and instead chose the advice from his ex, the lack of consideration of her views on modern medicine, the dismissal of her ability to, at the least, offer comfort were undermining their relationship. The slow loss of intimacy and connection and the reassigning of her duties as a wife to the ex-wife were hurtful and insulting. There were forces wearing away at the integrity of their marriage. The worst was yet to come.

She had been deep in thought when Cricket tunneled out from the warmth beneath the blankets. The dog yawned and stretched out her front legs, lying on her side, with the tail thumping against the mattress.

Cricket would need to go outside for her morning duties and, being that it was eleven degrees, there were many layers to be worn. She was glad Cricket was insisting they get out of bed now, thus pulling her away from her thoughts for a while. It was time to stop digging up the past.

Spending time without Gil gave her time to think, but sometimes she needed a break from that, too. She had needed to get away so she could figure out what was to become of her marriage, how Gil would react to the changes she was planning to make. But she didn’t need to solve their problems all in one day.

The cold sunshine was beckoning. “Hey, Mariesa.” She shouted when she heard someone stirring in the kitchen. “Are we gonna go snow-shoeing today?”