I warred with myself over whether to write this blog post or not. I hate sounding weak. I hate feeling as though I’m whining or feeling put upon, abused or taken for granted, or look as though I’m beating him up over nothing.

But I promised an uncompromised look at this illness and its effects, and so here I go.

This week has, so far, been abysmal. Several bounced checks–the mortgage 3 times!!–had me charging to the bank to see how this could have happened. My checkbook is impeccably kept, balanced just as my mother taught me all those years ago. But it wasn’t the bank’s fault at all that the deposits weren’t noted in my statement. No. There was a glitch in the distribution process by the conglomerate that oversees our retirement funds. In fact, the usual funds had ceased to be deposited 2 months ago.

Long story short, by the time I spoke to my rep and got it all straightened out, I was shaking, and it wasn’t a caffeine jolt. The process has been reinstated. I have to check to see that funds are where they should be tomorrow and then I can climb down off my prickly cactus.

All the while, I’ve had my eye on my husband’s condition. Diarrhea comes and goes. Shall I call the doctor for a different med to try? No, he says. It’s not bad today–today being yesterday. But overnight, something happened. Diarrhea returned and, for some reason, he seems–no, he IS–weaker than he was and needs help rising from his couch and from the bathroom facility. THAT made him super cranky.

“I need one of those raised toilet seats, like the ones in the hospital,” he said this morning. “You may have to get one.”

“Now?”

“No. But if it gets worse, yes.”

“Let me know,” I said.

By early afternoon, evidently, it had gotten worse. He came raging from the den–his bedroom–yelling that he couldn’t go on like this, “shitting” himself. He wasn’t going to sit on the john all night, helpless, until I got up in the morning to help him get off, and I should buy a damn seat now. And then he disappeared.

I pulled out my tablet, found said raised toilet seat and wanted to order, but couldn’t show it to him because he was… where? In the basement.

After some thumping noises, up he comes, dragging a contraption built of 3 or 4 five gallon plasterer’s buckets.

I show him the model.

“No,” he says. I’ll use this.”

A bucket? He’s going to sit on a bucket? I was torn between wanting to laugh at the ridiculousness of the concept and wincing at how uncomfortable it would be.

Instead, I yelled at him. “You scream at me to buy a damn raised seat and when I find one, you say forget it you’ll use a bucket?!”

Evidently, the steam spewing from my ears and the flames from my eyes and mouth had him rethinking his position–no pun intended. “Well, How much is it?” he asks.

“Does it bloody f#^king matter??!” I roar, and turn to pull the roast out of the oven. No sense ruining a good dinner. I wonder now how blood rare beef figured into the argument.

Long and short of it, I ordered the d@mned seat. Rush delivery. Friday. Between now and then, he can bloody well sit on the bucket for all I care.

In my defense, I just checked my biorhythms. five of the seven are below 0. “Frailty, thy name is woman.” <sigh>