In Sickness and in Health

As most of you who know us well enough to be here already know, Anne has Crohn’s Disease. She was diagnosed with it in 2004 (?) while we were still dating.

I remember making an emergency trip from California (where I was living at the time) to Colorado because she was in terrible pain and was admitted to the hospital and was told she had a disease and was understandably freaked about it. Being there for her felt like the right thing to do, and it turns out it was.

People often ask me how I’m doing when Anne has had a bad period. I appreciate the concern, but I’m always a bit bemused by it. I’m not the one in the hospital because the normal level of day to day pain Anne deals with got to be so excruciating that she couldn’t take it even with her serious arsenal of pharmaceuticals.

But standing helplessly by a sick spouse’s side is definitely frustrating. And I suppose that frustration wears at me. It’s maddening to see someone you love in so much pain and not be able to do anything to make it better other than be a loyal sidekick. It makes me so mad to see her get the runaround from insurance company and medial bureaucracy and feel overwhelmed and ignored. I wish there was something, anything, I could do to make it stop, or be better. But I can’t, and I hate that.

Anne deals with her disease with poise and stoicism every day and I’m amazed by her ability to keep her spirits high. It’s a shitty thing she’s been stuck with, but I think she does an amazing job not letting it get her down, and not letting it define her. She’s pretty awesome like that.