A SPOUSE’S VITAL ROLE THROUGHOUT A DISABILITY AND/OR A HEALTH STRUGGLE

I’m nearing the very end of my pregnancy journey (YIEEEKEEES!!!) It’s been a wild ride, I must say. These 9 months have been nothing short of a rollercoaster ride. But it hasn’t been solely about these 9 months of pregnancy. It’s been the pregnancy journey and my years long infertility struggle as a whole that’s made me so emotional these days. Now in 2022, statistics show that more and more couples go through infertility struggles than not. That means that most of you reading this will most likely understand what this blog post. If you’re about to go through fertility treatments, I totally understand your sadness and frustrations, especially in the waiting game as it can take up to a year to wait for a fertility doctor to first see you, then a year until you actually start the treatment, and so on and so forth. And let’s not forget the disappointment and anger that comes every month when you try for a baby the natural way during your menstrual cycle.

I never opened up about this before, but I had a miscarriage last October, right before I started my egg retrieval procedure. If we look at it from a technical, scientific term, I suffered a chemical pregnancy. I didn’t even know I was pregnant until the pregnancy ended. It was a heavy period that never seemed to end. It was absolutely painful, both physically and emotionally. It was a crippling experience as I couldn’t even get myself food out of the fridge because I was bleeding so much. All I could do was lay in bed and cry for a whole week. Luckily, though, I had my husband by my side to be a helping hand.

That’s what they call husbands – a helping hand. But they’re much more than that. They’re in it with you together. That’s why my husband is now known to me as my partner instead of my husband. It wasn’t a realization I made because I got married. I didn’t need to get married to understand that my husband is more than just a husband. Instead, I needed to go through a disability, a health struggle, infertility, and pregnancy to truly understand how vital my husband’s role in our relationship has been and always will be. They say that, in life, everything happens for a reason. And so, based on my own experiences, I wanted to make my own private analysis of the vital role a domestic partner has in those four departments. This blog post covers disability and health struggles.

A Disability

My husband has known that I have cerebral palsy since our very first date. I never made the fact a secret. I was 100% honest with him from the very beginning. I explained to him exactly what the disability entails and how it affected me specifically, because each individual case is different. I gave him a choice – either he stays or he goes. I didn’t want to get hurt as I did before, so I decided to tell him sooner rather than later before there were actual feelings involved.

He obviously decided to stay, and we’ve been together ever since. We never looked back, especially him. Throughout the years, we did absolutely everything together in spite of my disability. We travelled endlessly and he even taught me how to drive. For a person who has cerebral palsy, driving is a pretty big deal. It gave me a sense of independence. He then moved in with me at my parents’ house and he got to see more of how cerebral palsy affected my daily life. He always pushed me to be independent at home. He still does to this day. Of course, there are certain things I unable to do because of my physical disability. But then again, it’s not that I necessarily can’t do certain things, but rather that I do them differently than what is the ‘normal’ way of doing certain tasks. That’s why I despise the word ‘disability’.

What made my husband even more of a man, at least in my eyes, was when it came time to meet his family and beyond. Let’s just say my husband’s father was less than thrilled to meet me in the first place. He so desperately wanted me to be out of his son’s life. Of course, the reason for that was always me having cerebral palsy. No matter how hard he attempted to get me out of the picture, though, my husband never obliged. He had a lot to lose, but he always chose me no matter what the risk was. To this day, my relationship with my father-in-law hasn’t changed. To say that I give the slightest bit of a cr*p would be an overstatement. I never did, never have, nor will I ever care for my father-in-law’s approval of me or my relationship with my husband.

My husband and I have decided that my father-in-law will not be involved in our son’s life. It’s not about him not liking me or not even attempting to get to know me as more than just a person with a disability. I actually prefer that my father-in-law and I don’t have a relationship at all. It’s about the fact that he doesn’t seem to give a sh*t that he will have a grandchild, or that he’d only recognize him as a grandchild if his mother was able-bodied. My husband and I don’t want our son to be anywhere near an environment where he feels confused and unwelcome by his own family. We want him to feel loved and accepted. When it comes to our son, it’s either you’re fully in or you’re fully out. It’s a sad situation, but it is what it is. We’ll see what the situation is like in a few years.

Health Struggles

My previous post was all about the real meaning of ‘In sickness and in health,’ and through the blog post, I hope all of you who read it came to the conclusion that it’s more than just wedding vows that you say in front of your close friends and family. I certainly came to that conclusion just based on my own personal experience way before I even thought about getting married in the first place. You can read more on my experience by reading the blog post, ‘THE REAL DEFINITION OF IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH ‘TILL DEATH DO US PART.’

If there’s anything I learned about going through a health crisis when you’re in a relationship is that it can be such a tricky situation to be involved in. One minute you’re absolutely healthy, and in just a blink of an eye, it can all be taken away from you. When you’re diagnosed with a chronic illness, your life is turned upside down. And if kept untreated or mistreated, your condition gets worse and worse. The few years that my diagnosis was mistreated were the absolute worst years of my life. Despite the hardships of living with a chronic illness, I still had to at least try to live a normal life. I still had to work and make sure my husband was happy.

Did you know that 75% of marriages end in divorce when one person in the marriage struggles with a chronic illness? It’s a big number, especially since overall 50% of marriages end in divorce when two people are healthy, which is a big number as it is already. Knowing these numbers makes me question why I got married in the first place. They say, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ My husband and I didn’t get married because our relationship was broken – that’s for sure.

When you see your spouse struggle because of something they can’t control, it’s heartbreaking to watch. Nonetheless, life keeps moving forward, and you end up fighting for your spouse more than you’d ever fight for yourself. Throughout my times of struggle, I watched my spouse fight for me, my health, and my well-being more than he’d ever fight for himself, and it didn’t matter to him who or what it cost him. I’ve seen him lose his tempter with friends over their ignorant behaviour when I had seizures and struggled to breathe, and he didn’t care. These people are no longer in our life and it’s the best thing for us. I don’t want anyone in my life who thinks it’s okay to be angry at someone for that reason. To me, the only way they could be happy and not angry was if I were dead. My husband’s fight for my health and safety could cost him his job, and I don’t think he’d care as long as he knows that I’m safe and sound.