Hiding in Plain Sight

Know how life bumbles along and bumbles along, and things like politics and clean laundry and a dog-hair-free floor seem to matter until all of a sudden something cataclysmic happens and the world just stops and the only thing that matters is that the person you love keeps breathing?  Yeah, it has been that kind of week.

For the most part, I haven't talked about it.  But then, that is the problem, isn't it?  There is this hidden illness that nobody talks about but so many confront every day.  This disease that kills and maims and reduces life to misery and is very, very real.  It's been a part of my life since I met my husband, much as he and I both tried to sweep it under the rug.  And it became very, very real to us both a week ago last Thursday.

Depression.  For so long, I just didn't understand.  Perhaps I still don't.   But until people open up and talk about it like they do any other disease (diabetes, cancer, heart failure) wonderful people like my husband will go without help, not understanding themselves, and not understood by those who love them most. 

We tried.  For years, we tried.  I asked Julio to get help.  I begged him to talk to someone other than me.  "Choose happiness", I'd say.  "Home is where you are", I'd blabber.

But I completely missed the point. 

He could no more choose happiness than a patient with leukemia can just tell all those blasts where to go.

After a few years, he finally relented and sought help.  Only, the help he got wasn't enough.  The meds were working, but none of us; not his doctors, not me, not even himself took it seriously enough.  We didn't talk about it outside our family.  We kept it hidden, attempted to deal with its ramifications all by ourselves. 

Until we couldn't.  

We can't not talk about it anymore.  We can't keep it between us, and take the medications as prescribed.  They aren't enough.  We're fighting, but the disease is fighting back.  

September 19th at 10:30 pm, I thought it had won.  It tried to take his life, and so very nearly succeeded.  

But we prevailed.  Life and love and luck and medicine came through.  His life was saved thanks to the ICU and ventilators.  And now, we're talking about it.  Too many people suffer, too many families hide in shame, pretending everything is okay, that no disease clouds their lives.  It is time to bring this very real disease, with its very real life-threatening complications out of hiding so that it can be vanquished and controlled.  

Julio wants to live.  He wants to get better.  He does not want this disease to permeate our lives, tear us apart, isolate us from those we love.  He's fighting back, and I'm alongside of him.  We're not doing it alone.  We can't.