Thoughtful Thursday

Today is thoughtful Thursday on the blogosphere so I thought I would share some random thoughts then will do another post for an update on Carlos.

Bear with me...

I was asked recently, 'what's it like to deal with all this stuff?'.  I usually give a pretty flippant reply - after all it is what it is and you just deal with shit as it comes up.  My patients have sometimes heard this lovely philosophy.  Typically, this is how I approach life and Carlos' health has taught me that.  There have been some very dark days, not only recently, but in past years.  There were some days that I wondered and pondered becoming a widow at a pretty young age.  I cried a lot those days, thinking about life without him.  I get teary-eyed as I write this.  Carlos, for better and sometimes worse, has been a part of my life for 20 years.  To be forced to imagine a life without him is as painful as imagining the loss of a parent.  It makes my 'heart' ache.  But this has taught me something important.  Mind you this is a lesson I am still learning. Time is valuable. Don't waste it worrying about unimportant things. I wish I could get everyone to understand this lesson and to learn to not sweat the small stuff. It's not important how clean you kept your house. Really, it's not. Perhaps a basic level of sanitation is good but beyond that, let it go. Spend that time with people you love, doing fun things. Let me say it again.....time is valuable....don't waste it.

Beth bought me a kindle book called Life in Limbo: Waiting for a Heart Transplant. I've definitely had some identifiable moments with the woman who wrote this book. Her husband got sick very quickly and was waiting for a heart. I want to share some of the writing that spoke to me in a very visceral way. "It's so tempting to to sugarcoat everything so you appear to your friends and family, and anyone else who might possibly read what you've written, that you are this incredibly strong person. You don't want them to know the truth." The truth is you feel you can never be strong enough....and it gets so overwhelming at times, that you just don't want to try to be anymore. The ease of just letting everything fall apart, letting yourself fall apart, is tempting at times. Things seem so much better now so I can only hope that the LVAD hospitalization was the worst we will have to deal with. But there's always this sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop. I'm hoping it won't To be continued :-)