I want to tell you about my wife. Today is our 12th wedding anniversary (although B. and I have known each other for 28 years, and been together for 16).
All those years neatly divide into two sections of very unequal proportions. On the far side are the good years, the ones we remember nostalgically, the ones that sustain us when we're trying to fight off depression. On this side are the last two years, the ones that have transpired since the doctor told me that I had Mantle Cell Lymphoma.
I was smitten by B. from the moment that I first saw her standing backlit against the August sun in the doorway of my parents' house. She was head-turningly beautiful and, as I soon discovered, very, very smart and very, very, funny. Probably the funniest person that I have ever personally known. Her visit only lasted a few days, but those days were delightful.
Different life paths kept us apart for the next 12 years. But by 1992 both of our circumstances had changed. She came north, leaving behind a small but beautiful house in the Sierra Nevadas, a part of the world that she loved, to live in an apartment in a nondescript suburb with me. I remember how when we pulled off the freeway into town, she took a look around, and burst into tears. Thinking back on that moment now, I am humbled.
The years passed and I was incredibly enriched by our relationship. She introduced me in a serious way to the outdoors, to hiking, backpacking and birding which became one of the central themes of our life together. I became kinder and more tolerant, inspired by long conversations and her daily example. (I have become convinced that overall, women are better human beings than men, except for when they try to be too much like us.)
For my part, I introduced her to a broader world of books and travel. We love to travel and I know of no couple that does it better than we do. We can spend day after day together in each other's company without a single cross word. We talk of politics, science, medicine (she's a Nurse Practitioner), literature and art, then exclaim over some bit of scenery that jumps out of the landscape and refusing to be ignored. Other times we sit side by side in comfortable silence.
B. never wanted children, but I had a son from my first marriage, and so she took on the role of stepmom, with accomplishment and loving dedication. It was not what she would have chosen, but she made peace with the situation and did a great job. My boy, who is now a man, worships her.
I am in awe of my wife's ability to do the right thing, even when it is hard. It certainly would have been easy for her to be a different person. At 15, she lost her mother and for nearly a decade lived a very hard life, the details of which are too intimate to write about here. At one point she was nearly homeless, a time when she would occasionally go hungry to make certain that her dogs were fed. Her sister wanted her to abandon the dogs, but that's not the way B. leads her life.
I could go on describing our life and love in this, the longer, first chapter of our relationship, but I don't want to go on too much (I hope I haven't lost too many of you already with what might strike some as self-indulgence).
Two years ago came the diagnosis of Mantle Cell Lymphoma, a very aggressive form of the disease. At the time that I was diagnosed, untreated, I probably would only have lived for a couple more weeks. I got treatment, and it was brutal: harsh chemotherapy, which nearly killed me.
When they had to stop that, I was sent to have a stem-cell transplant. Once again I almost died, this time from the consequences of the high-dose radiation that I received. B. saved my life after the transplant when the medical team taking care of me gave me to much of the wrong drug, causing me to have violent hallucinations and nearly seize. (She lay awake one night with her hands over my chest to keep me from ripping my lines out and bleeding to death.) She finally, prevailed upon them to change the drugs that I was getting and within a few hours the hallucinations stopped.
Night after night she stayed with me, sleeping in chairs and on hard benches, always aware, always watching always ready, making certain that I felt safe and was as comfortable as possible. She was almost never away from my side during the 40 days that I spent in the hospital. She would go home for a day or for a weekend and work 12 hour days then come back to be with me while being on call for consultations with the nursing home from 8am to 8pm every day.
The treatment seemed to work. I was released from the hospital and went home. For four months I recovered and got stronger. Meanwhile B. worked, took care of the house, took care of me and carried on a Herculean struggle with the insurance company. She would get angry and frustrated, but never with me.
Then 5 months after the transplant, I got sick again. At first no one could figure out what it was, not even the doctors at the large research hospital I ended up at. But eventually they did. It turned out that I had treatment-related Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). In other words my lymphoma treatment had given me leukemia, something which is known to happen, but usually years, not months, after treatment.
So, we started all over again: chemo, another stem cell transplant, months spent living away from home, insurance company battles, fevers, nausea and graft versus host disease. And B. was always there by my side, watching me like a hawk, researching (she found another case like mine in the medical records that my doctors were unaware of), shopping, cleaning, working over the phone and always, always encouraging me to keep on fighting.
Things have not gone so well this second time around, but we have not given up hope. Today is my 12th wedding anniversary and I'm hoping for many more, but should that not be the case, I wanted to share with her, and you and the world how wonderfully fortunate I am. I, for no reason relating to my merits that I can see, have been blessed to be married to the finest human being I have ever known. Being with her is a joy and these poor, inadequate words come nowhere near describing how grateful I am nor how much I love her.
Thank you, sweetheart. Happy anniversary. I love you with all my heart.