I know just how he feels

Anonymous
February 23, 2010 at 4:17 pm

When i came home from the hospital, I would try to do little things around the house to help out my wife, the love of my life and now my caregiver. I would get extremely frustrated at about 15 minutes into any chore. I have always been the cook at our house, we both work, and I enjoy cooking and am quite good at it. But I could not even concentrate on the simplest task. I felt bad having to relie on my wife for everything including bathing. We live in wisconsin and when she not only was taking care of me but had to shovel snow that was one of my breaking points. We since have hired a young man to do the shoveling. I am now after 5 weeks capable of cooking again and doing little chores. I can even get down to the basement (very carefully) and work on my wine making and some laundry. I now have about an hour of activity before needing just 10 to 15 minutes of down time before continuing. I can keep that pace now for about four hours. i am hoping that next week I willl return to work for a couple of hours per day and increase from there. I felt and still feel your husbands fears. I have asked my wife many time what would we do if I don’t get better and each time she says that we will deal with that if and when that occurs. In the majority of the GBS cases, he will get better maybe not all better but good enough. I worry about my job, health insurance, my gardens, vacations, visiting my grandchildren. These are all big things to worry about but number 1 is to get better first so that these things can happen. I sent you my phone number, when he is ready have him call mei if he would like to talk.

Hi … This is Harry’s wife, here. I just thought I’d put in a few words for you, too. One thing to tell your husband is that he’s not used to planning his life out several months into the future … like when we were pregnant! As women, we’re used to that sort of thing, and men aren’t. It took Harry awhile to realize that he maybe can’t do things right now, but he can see the improvement he’s making, and he can now see that the other things will improve, too. Maybe not as fast as he’d like, but it’s coming. His neurologist really did a good job of explaining that we have to wait for the inside healing to take place. While he feels good on the outside as feeling starts to come back, and he can walk better, he gets so tired because there is still all that nerve-healing that is going on inside. Harry noticed several times that when he felt particularly good and did extra things, he got super-tired, and it set him back about three days when he couldn’t do anything, and then he had to start over again. It’s a slow process; and that’s been the hardest thing to deal with. One person on this website said that GBS means get-better-slowly, and that really is true! So just keep telling him that it’s just one day at a time, and soon he will see improvement. One of your jobs is to hold him back and not let him do too much. I’ve had 37 years of practice, telling Harry what to do. Sometimes he even listens =-)