TW: Recent Apocalyptic Thinking (November 2013)

Trigger Warning: I am not sure if anything is triggering in this article, but given the nature of it I felt it best to mark it as such. The article talks about my recent mindset and feelings of hopelessness.

Lately I have fallen into a pattern of apocalyptic thinking, fueled by my feeling like my world is crashing down around me. The feeling that there is no hope. I have only seen pain, suffering and endless darkness around me.

I have seen no positive way out of situations, every scenario I have run has seen things ending poorly. No matter how much I analyzed things, it was always the same result, catastrophic. It had all surrounded my wife’s health.

At the end of October, my wife fell and ended up in the hospital and then later a physical therapy rehab center after breaking her toe. Now, the broken toe is far from the only problem at work. She has been suffering from a rash of problems with her feet and increased muscle weakness in her legs all year. She is also epileptic and the doctor was in the process of changing her medication.

After she got to the rehab center, they started messing up her medication. I won’t go into all the details, but they messed it up quite a bit. This among other factors led to increased stress and anxiety on her part. All of it led to get having increased seizure activity.

Here is where the real problems started. For the first few weeks I was working with the center to get her meds right and reduce her anxiety, feeling that was the cause of her increased seizure activity. It was the only thing that had changed. She had been almost completely off one of one of her meds when she got to the rehab center because of the change. She had been coming off it for over a month and her level of seizure activity had not increased. The amount she had been on when she got there has no real therapeutic value.

Then one day her mother came to visit her and saw my wife having the increased activity. She ran to her husband and had him make an appointment for my wife had the neurologist. She wanted my wife back on the medication she was just coming off. It is a ****ing miracle drug in her mind.  This was done without talking to my wife or I. When the appointment came around I was not available because I didn’t have enough advance notice to get off work.

Then at a family planning meeting, to go over my wife’s care at the rehab center, her mother commented about talking to her father because he has dealt with her case for years and has power-of-attorney. Next, she had the doctor increase the medication she had come off of back to three times a day, again without talking to either of us.

This was the last straw and where the damn broke. I told my wife I could not be involved in her care anymore because of her parents. If they were going to get involved and take over, then I could not be involved. I could not live with them taking over like that. Knowing her mother the way I do, I saw no way to tell them to butt out, especially after her mom threw the fact that her father had power-of-attorney in my face at that meeting, without it being catastrophic.

I could, and still do, only see the following outcomes:

1. Best case – Her parents want nothing to do with us/me for a short time, but eventually come around and everything goes back to normal.

2. Her parents tell me I am not welcome in their home anymore and want nothing to do with me.

3. Her parents refuse to have anything to do with either of us and my wife never comes to hate and resent me for it.

4. Worst case – Her parents refuse to have anything to do with either of us and my wife eventually comes to hate and resent me for it.

I am terrified that this will cost me my marriage eventually. I don’t want to lose my wife, but I don’t want her to lose her parents either. I would love to believe that everything will work out fine, but I cannot believe it will.