Boundless Love

February 20, 2017

When your retired, and a full time RV’er and a medical situation arrises 2700 miles from everything familiar, it is challenging.  Like many others in this country, our medical insurance is expensive and our deductible is crazy high topping out at $6,750 per person. However, we are both very grateful to have insurance….even if it is basically just major medical coverage.

It was a chain of circumstances and complications that led to  the medical emergency that resulted in surgery for my husband of 42 years this past week.

What I have learned to do when there is a problem bigger then me, is to remind myself how vast, boundless, limitless, measureless, and immense my God is and so I usually give it to Him to handle. He does a much better job with it then I could ever do by myself, so that is what I did. Then together we focused on making the best decision for the immediate situation in front of us. We then repeated this process again and again, until there was a solution for every situation that came up. Some solutions we had control of and others we did not.

Even though Dan has asthma, he has been blessed with a strong immune system and has always been very healthy.

With that said, he has experienced an occational bout of acid reflux which turned out to be gallstones and the cause of flare ups that mimic a heart attack. Nobody knew this, not even multiple ER doctors he has seen over the years.

After one such bout that accumulated other symptoms, compounding the pain until it was it was no longer bearable,   we texted a friend for a hospital recommendation.  We were on our way home from Cape Canaveral, when we decided to drive straight to the hospital and not go home. Since we live in our RV, home is where we park it. Currently we are parked in Mt Dora, Florida so that was the direction we were heading.

We reached the ER by 10:30 am and they wheeled him into surgery at 1:00 pm. It was so fast, and Dan was in so much pain that he didn’t have time to over think it.

The surgeon appeared and said to the pre-operating male nurse “We need to go now and get his gallbladder out, his infection is raging, and I am concerned about sepsis.”

I quickly bent down and whispered into Dan’s ear what was meant only for us and only for that moment. Then I kissed him and they took him away to the operating room while a male nurse led me to the waiting room.

Alone, I felt the heat rising in my face and the tears stung my eyes. I wasn’t scared, I was hurting.  I have known Dan since I was 14 and we have  grown up together. In that time, he has never broken a bone or been operated on. I knew he was desperate for a solution and I was desperate for him not to be in pain.

Dan and I are so different in many ways, that we laugh about it sometimes. We argue about it too as our communication wave link is not always in sync. Yet we have learned how to keep our love alive while keeping our vows. It is a life long process that requires continuous commitment and during this process we found that we complete each other.

I was elated to see him sitting up in bed after the operation. His eyes were a bit glassy and so were mine. “I’m missing body parts” he said.

“You still have all the important ones” I said with a laugh as I hugged him.