LOVE...
>> Monday, February 8, 2010
A Massachusetts native, Michelle DeRusha moved to Nebraska in 2001, where she found grasshoppers the size of Cornish Hens, looming grain elevators and God. She’s raising two rambunctious boys with her husband, Brad; works part-time for Nebraska public television and radio; launders Sponge Bob briefs on a regular basis; and writes about finding faith in the everyday on her blog Graceful, and in a monthly column for the Lincoln Journal Star.
Today at Jumping Tandem, she writes about love...
It all started, ironically, with a stomach bug on Valentine’s Day. Soon more symptoms followed, one blooming after the other: swollen glands, throbbing headaches, pressing fatigue, skin rashes, nagging cough.
Swallowing back nausea, I choked down a single blueberry at a time and dropped fifteen pounds in three weeks. Even my underwear was too big, pouching around my hips and sagging like a stretched-out swimsuit in the rear.
A few months prior I had run my first marathon, and now I could barely stagger six blocks from Grand Central to my office.
I offered pints of blood and eagerly endured invasive tests and procedures, hoping for a diagnosis and relief from the horrifying thought that I was dying. Bloodwork, endoscopy, xrays, sigmoidoscopy, colonoscopy -- all revealed nothing. Dr. Kauffman was clearly done with me. “Nothing’s turned up, the tests are all negative,” he told me coldly as I sat on the the examining room table, the soft blue gown tucked around my thighs, goosebumps running down my calves. “It’s a virus. You’ll just have to wait it out. Call the office if you need to come in again,” he advised in a clipped voice, hand on the door knob.
Finally, more than four months after Valentine’s Day, I was handed a diagnosis: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
I quit my editor job in New York and moved, at age 25, back in with my parents to watch Sanford and Sons reruns and eat Hamburger Helper at their kitchen table. I learned as much as I could about CFS, and what I discovered shocked me. It should not have been a surprise – after all, the name pretty much spells it out – but CFS is, in fact, a chronic illness. Many of the people I met in the local support group had battled the illness for nine, twelve, fifteen years – not working, fighting years-long disability cases, on good days achieving a shower and a change of clothes or a walk around the block.
I was terrified that I would end up like them.
While my mom nagged about COBRA-ing my health insurance plan, and my dad insisted I was depressed, my friends would call, inquiring incredulously, “So you’re, like, tired?” How could I explain without sounding like a total flake? That “tired” meant I couldn't even walk to the mailbox at the end of my parents’ driveway without resting on the curb before making the return trip back to the house.
Only one person got it. One person understood. Brad, my boyfriend at the time, believed in two things: one, that I had a real illness; and two, that I would ultimately recover.
On my darkest days as I lay in bed, weeping and exhausted from my morning shower, he would reassure me again and again, “You will get better. You will recover.” I didn’t truly believe the words, yet I yearned to hear them repeated. They gave me a sliver of hope – hope I clung to like ice crystals clinging to a brittle leaf.
Brad didn’t bother with God talk – after all, I didn’t believe in God back then. We didn’t pray for my recovery. We didn’t talk about my illness being a thorn in my flesh, or a dark hour. But I knew it was his faith in God that kept him steady and gave him the courage to encourage me. And his faith in God, and his love for me, fueled my hope for recovery.
It took about 18 months – a long, slow, deliberate process – but I did indeed recover. And two years after that, I married the man who stood by me in my darkest hours. We swayed at the altar in the white clapboard church and repeated those often-cliché words: in sickness and health. And as our voices softly answered the minister, those words rang true. In sickness and in health. In good times and in bad.
We did. We do. Read more...
