Real Men Are Caregivers
A visit to the doctor or diagnostic clinic may take a few hours of preparation, travel and execution, but the home care one provides for a partner with any kind of permanent disability is 24/7.
My wife is among the first group of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) sufferers lucky enough to age with this debilitating disease, thanks to new therapies. It used to be unheard of to see a 70- or 80-year-old with MS, and if you did, they were always immobile and uncommunicative, almost always unable to take care of themselves.
My wife is still able to traverse stairs and take care of herself when I have to be gone for a day or two. For 25 years, she got daily injections of Copaxone, and because of the difficulty in reaching two areas on her body where the shot had to be administered, I gave her the shot two times a week. After all these years, the daily injectable drug stopped making a difference in the progression of her disease.
After her initial diagnosis, she endured six months of steroid injections and another six to get stabilized enough to be able to start Copaxone. With her excellent researching ability from her master’s degree in sociology, she went to school on what she learned about MS.
One evening after dinner during that first year, she asked me, “Do you want to stay with me?” I asked her what she meant.
She told me that she read in an MS publication that men didn’t like to be with a sick woman. I replied, “Those aren’t men, they’re wussies.” Real men adjust, hunker down and take care of their partner.
“They do not run,” I told her. “Those who do are cowards, in my opinion.”
It has now been 27 years since her diagnosis. She remembers exhibiting symptoms as a teenager, but was misdiagnosed by a long line of doctors. It took a savvy local resident physician to know something was wrong and send her to a neurologist in 1996.
Despite debilitating chronic fatigue and inadequate pain management, she returned to school in the ’90s, eventually graduating with honors from Humboldt State. She followed with a master’s, though her disease has kept her from participating in her field.
If MS hadn’t gotten in the way, she most likely would have been teaching at a prestigious university with a doctorate degree, and I would have been the doctor’s househusband.
Rich Jordan and his wife live in Arcata.
