FishWife...His Wife

by Katrina
(Newport News, VA, USA)

How do I begin telling how brain injury has affected my life? I called myself fish wife because nowadays that's what I feel like--a nagging fishwife. Do this..do that...no...please take your medicine.

Everything is a command, with some hugs and kisses in between, but for the most part I am mostly caretaker and I tried so hard not to be. It's like I was the last one to really understand the memo--'hello, you're 27 and taking care of your 28 year old husband. He will not be the same, your life will not be the same. Your plans will not be the same. Hello.'

My husband and I were married at 21, both of us were 21, I was going into my senior year of college and he was fresh out of basic training/airborne school. We were young and hopeful and in love--and fighting like newlyweds and then he was deployed in the middle of our honeymoon. That was fine, while he was away (and it was hard, lost a lot of sleep and a lot of weight, and he...lost a lot too) I was wrapping up a not so shiney academic career (but I graduated!).

He came back and he was quite different. At first I was just really happy to get him back alive--and at the time I believed whole--then we settled in North Carolina to our life as a newly married couple. I did not help. I was jobless for seven months, refusing to use my four year degree to get an assistant manager job delivering pizzas--I thought I could get something better.

Eventually I caved and became bitter. Even more bitter when I saw the real changes in my husband--he was extremely sad, drank everyday, couldn't sleep with the windows open, extremely angry, paranoid, self-destructive...he was prescribed anti-depressants and drank while taking them. He would drive drunk. He stopped going to work, he got kicked out. He didn't really recover from that, though he tried...really hard.

I eventually joined the military under the rationalization that it was his turn now to go to school while I supported him--he took that as me abandoning him and asked for a divorce about 2 weeks before I was finished with my training. And that's when it happened.

He got into a car accident on Memorial Day, May 28, 2007, a week before I was due back home. He was driving drunk, in a car he called a death trap (we couldn't afford better--so I thought, now I'm thinking we should have afforded it). We don't think he was wearing his seatbelt. He was in a coma for a week, his jaw was wired shut for about five months, and when he woke up he wasn't sure who I was...he sorta took it on faith that the woman who came to see him everyday, who changed him, and bathed him, who hugged and kissed him, was his wife.

He also thought that rehab was jail--really, he asked me once when the nurses were holding him down to draw his blood why he was in jail. Remembering all of this makes my chest hurt and my eyes water...it makes me remember how deep the love I had for him was, I felt like his wife. Two years later I feel less like his wife and more like a spoiled, angry, disillusioned B*&^#.

I love him but I am scared. I don't understand why I didn't listen when people told me he would never be the same--I was offended--surely they didn't see the man I saw. How could they say this about someone who should have been dead and wasn't. Someone who still shocks people at how well he recovered? I'm so scared because I was not (am not?) realistic, I wanted him to be himself again--be independent, not to just demand it and not have earned it (like now, he can't really handle it).

How do you reteach that? Can he re-learn it? If he can't, what then? I'm so angry and sorry and sad for him. I'm so angry and sad most times. I get jealous of people and their lives, I should be pregnant, worrying about raising babies, getting a better job, further my education, he should be doing the same. Not anymore. I'm sick of my own sob story, this is a story of hope because he's still alive and still has dreams, still ambitious. He is just not the same.

We are both treated differently, we both act differently. I didn't like people before, I like them even less now (sometimes, and sometimes I am extremely grateful for them) but then I find that both he and I need them sometimes. I hate our local convenience store/gas station, they have threatened to ban us because he makes scenes there, and when I take him I park in front of the store and watch him while he buys. I go in if it takes too long or it looks like he's having a hard time.

Recently his sister started working there which means that he has started treating it as sort of an extension of home--and I admit to becoming even more lax. Well, he takes advantage sometimes (many times) because people don't want to be rude to him he pushes, he becomes belligerent and if you engage him (at least as a family member/someone he knows and is pretty confident won't hurt him) he will become louder, more explicit, more destructive. So he goes in there and tries to buy alcohol (which he can't have because he's on about 7 different types of meds which he takes 6 times a day) and his sister refuses to sell to him.

She comes to get me out of the car. The store manager takes her lead and takes the customers around him, the last time this happened his sister was not working there and I allowed the cashier to sell to him and then proceeded to call the police as an escort to the emergency (a bluff that he called--they came out, I drove him to the emergency room where the PA on duty proceeded to tell us that the amount he drank was not going to do any real damage but that he should not be drinking).

So she continued to refuse and argue with him until she got fed up and called the cops because he would not leave the store. No one listened to me, I was kind of speechless anyway, I had no idea how I let it all get so out of control. We leave before the police get into the store and explain while we're in the car why the police officer had to show up in the first place. My husband was still angry (but without the alcohol!) and proceeded to tell the officer how he almost died for the country and this is how he's treated.

The officer is calm, says thank you for serving, tells him to put on his seatbelt and me to take him home. His sister comes home a few minutes later and tells him that he has to stop coming into the store while she's working and arguing with her, she tells me that I have to stop sending him there--that homecare goes in with him, he can't go in alone with no one to watch him (makes sense). She says if it happens again we're both banned from the store. I take offense because I've never been banned from anywhere before.

But if my husband is banned then so am I, I was sort of hoping it would happen. I was tired of the drama of him trying to buy alcohol and was out of ideas. She said it wasn't fair because when I'm at work my husband can't come down there and bother me, but he can bother her. I think to myself, when I'm at work, I schedule his appointments and work out the kinks of his schedule at home, with homecare, with the hospital during my lunchtime and then go on to worry about getting my job done correctly and trying not to be distracted and worried all of the time.

I can't hate 7-11, him, or her because I am having a problem accepting all of this. I do hate myself a little because I've always had a hard time accepting the reality, too busy wishing on possibilities. And now. I am not sure how to take care of him.