Two weeks to the day after I took my new job at the hospital my husband went out of work and never went back. You have to understand, he was Superman. He was one of those men that worked for 20 hours, slept for 4, and then did it all again. He slung 300 pound water heaters on the weekly and was so strong and active. This was a total shock.
He woke up one Saturday morning and could not bear weight on his right knee. I have always been way more cautious than he and said we needed to take him to the doctor. He tried to argue with me and I cut him off. I said, "Nope, you wake up and can't walk, you go to the doctor. That's how this works." He opened his mouth as if to argue again, paused a moment, and then said, "You know what? That's fair."
What followed was evaluations of his knee by our family physician, then an orthopedist, who told him to do squats and other exercises to rehab the knee because a man of his age is likely to have these issues. But it wasn't just these issues that we began to notice. As we began to reflect on the last year or so, we realized he had had other brief illnesses and periods of feeling badly that we couldn't explain. He had taken to napping sometimes, which he NEVER did. I was the one that loved to nap. He was the one that was annoyed when I did. He also would get seemingly simple colds that would hang on and on and on. And the fatigue he was experiencing on a regular basis was far more severe than he let on. I had no idea he had been struggling as much as he had.
So, at a follow up with our family doctor (who we LOVE, by the way) he started exploring more into his symptoms. He was still on leave from work, being unable to walk properly. It is pretty hard to crawl around in small spaces and sling water heaters when you can't walk well, or at all, depending on how the day was going. Our family physician (in shorthand texts I refer to him as "Dr. H") referred him to a rheumatologist for further evaluation. He suspected something more was going on. Dr H had done much of the legwork for her with extensive labs, etc, so the appointment went fairly smoothly. What he heard was not something he had not expected. Fibromyalgia. She diagnosed him with Fibromyalgia.
"There is no cure" are words you never want to hear. And while a chronic illness is not always fatal or as severe as some other illnesses, it still laid out a road in front of us of a lifetime of symptom management and co-occurring illnesses and disorders. Fibromyalgia is extremely rare in men, many experts think it may be partly because it goes underreported. Many men will try to "muscle through" fatigue and pain and never seek care for many of the symptoms.
So here we were, a month into a new job for me and he not sure if he would ever return to his, and we were so uncertain about what was to come. We had no idea. And I was scared to death.
But we did have one thing that made it bearable... We had each other
Photo Credit: Autumn Dozier
Be well, y'all.