My husband was deployed to Afghanistan in 2009. I was to hold down the fort and raise our little toddler alone while he went to combat. I didn't know what he was doing there, everything was very hush-hush. When he came home our life turned completely upside down and the smart, capable, bread-winner, protector, best friend, husband that left for Afghanistan wasn't who came home. His limbs were all there but his brain, his personality, and his physical abilities were all different. I became the caregiver and advocate for my disabled husband would now function more like an elderly dementia patient. We had no money, no help, no information, no guidance, and no support. I was given a broken husband and expected to move on with life.
I write a blog about my husband, his experience, and our experience together but this one won't focus on all that. I'll skip ahead to say that what it took to get the care my husband needed and the benefits my husband had earned by sacrificing his future took every ounce of my being. I work great under pressure, I am a tenacious fighter for justice, and I can ignore my own needs better than anyone I know! And so I took a back seat and my husband and family became first!
During this journey, I came to the realization that if anything were to happen to me, my husband would have to be placed in a home or die. My didn't know what would happen to our little boy. The outlook was a horrible one and all that had to happen was for me to get cancer, diabetes, a heart attack, or God forbid some unforeseen accident. While I have no control over accidents, I have some control over how healthy I am and what quality my body is in. For years of fighting for my husband's needs and putting myself on the back burner, I had gained all my weight back to the heaviest I'd been, 256 lbs. Worse than that number, my advocating work was all done by computer and phone while sitting on my big, growing butt. I was 40 years old and my body was hurting from lack of care, complete neglect of every aspect of it, and basically I was just slowly killing myself.
When I realized that I couldn't do this to myself anymore, it was not fair to my husband or my children. Here I was selflessly giving all of me to everyone I loved but to myself I was being completely selfish. I really wasn't thinking of them at all because I was just helping my body become a diseased, broken, dying body even sooner than it needed to be. This was my wake up call!
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