Joe

Yesterday evening Joe did something, that he always does, and it annoyed me as it always does.

But lets start with the morning.

Two nights ago, the day before yesterday, Joe sat down on the side of my bed and told me that he had been experiencing shooting pains just under his rib cage for several days. I lay there, incapacitated by the news and the realization that he'd not mentioned anything of the sort for all that time, listening to him describe deep, sharp, pains that were almost unbearable and which had been increasing in frequency.

The reason he had told me was that, as we had the girls for the weekend, he wanted to go to emergency on Monday. We had planned to go to the ROM spider exhibit and the kids were looking forward to it. He thought the next day we could go to the hospital.

That's not what happened.

I called Marissa, we arranged getting Joe and I to the hospital and back. She would come straight from her over night shift and pick all of us up and drop us off and come back with the girls to get us once we were done.

After checking into the hospital and moving from waiting room to waiting room, Joe had been down for three tests. On our way back from one of them, I heard the nurse, on the phone, arranging yet another test, a big, expensive one. My mind went into deep panic. Let's not kid ourselves, I was panicked from the moment he spoke to me. I am the one that gets sick, albeit not for a long time, in this family.

We waited again for the final test and were told that we'd see the doctor in about an hour. By then we'd been there for about 4.5 hours. We chatted and talked like we were waiting for a movie, met and chatted with people in the same waiting area as if this was one big social event. But it wasn't. It was our way, all of us, from keeping worry at bay. It didn't work.

I can't worry small stuff, I worry big stuff only. I'm good at catastrophe so that's what my mind automatically does. My tension goes through the roof and the pictures in my mind are drawn from every medical show I've ever seen.

Finally we were called into a small area and Joe's going to be fine. It's nothing serious and we went away with a bit of advice and a prescription.

It was done.

I fought tears for much of the day. The sense of helplessness and the realization that I could do nothing to help combined to grab a cold fist around my heart. It took a couple of hours for me to calm down. Joe too relaxed and we had a fun evening with the kids.

So when Joe did his annoying habit that he's been doing for years, I realized, I'm glad he's with me, annoying me, that's the best possible outcome.

________

PS our hospital was wonderful in the way they reacted to us being a couple and being married. Once that was established there was no question about me sitting in, accompanying Joe to different parts of the hospital for tests, it was all good. We both remembered the days when LGBT people could not visit their partners in the hospital because they weren't family. We were recognized and treated as a legitimate family from the moment we arrived. Thanks to Southlake for that.