It's Just an Infection: Life Goes On

By The Tart from Down Under

Posted on Wednesday, July 20th, 2016

This post is a follow up to It’s Just an Infection and Leaving.


It seems cliche to write, but life does go on, and I had to go back to mine. Only five days had passed since Mr. Down Under had a heart attack, but it was Monday morning and I had to go back to work. I worked as a child care worker, however, Mr. Down Under was the larger income earner in our relationship. So with him in hospital, money was going to be tricky. Luckily we had been saving for a house deposit, so we were going to be ok financially.

I don’t want to make this post about the medical system, but here in Australia it is fantastic. We have a public system that taxes higher earners at a higher rate to cover medical, and even have a small levy included in our car registration to cover any ambulance usage. With everything Mr. Down Under had been through, and would continued to go through, even though he is not an Australian citizen (he is a permanent resident, and New Zealand citizen) we were not charged for a single dollar of his care. And I will always be so thankful for that. Just continuing to cover our daily life costs was a struggle and reduced our savings to nothing.

Now, 48 hours doesn’t sound like an extraordinary amount of time, but it felt like a long time. I had to push past the fact that someone I loved was sick, and we didn’t know what was coming next. 48 hours were how long we had to wait for doctors to decide that Mr. Down Under’s oxygen saturation levels had stabilized enough to be able to come partially out of sedation.

It finally felt like it was going to be ok, there had been setbacks, but doctors were able to bring Mr. Down Under out of sedation without any immediate issues. He still had a breathing tube inserted and was being assisted with oxygen, but he had improved. The first night I came in and he was awake, there was fear, both his and mine. He held my hand and stared at me the entire time I was there. It was the first time I remember having seen him scared. With a breathing tube inserted we weren’t able to talk, but when the end of visiting hours came, Mr. Down Under made it very clear he didn’t want me to leave. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to stay.

A pattern emerged for me. My life became wake up, go to work, go to the hospital, sleep and begin again. I felt exhausted both physically and emotionally. Working with children made my days especially difficult. I couldn’t let myself feel too much. I had to put on a happy face for the parents and my kids. My assistant at the time was a close friend.  She had been and sat with me at the hospital and knew everything that was happening. It made it easier that someone was there with me that knew the extent of what was going on, understood my low points, and was kind enough to help pick up anything I had missed during my working hours.

Removing the breathing tube was the next step, and in doing so the doctors found that Mr. Down Under’s throat muscles had deteriorated. It was a risk that they were aware of, but the damage was normally minimal. Not Mr. Down Under, he had to stand out and be different. In this case, the damage from the breathing tube had been significant, meaning he was unable to talk, eat or drink, and doctors informed us they were unsure how well the muscles would recover.

The good news was that with being off oxygen Mr. Down Under could finally leave ICU and be moved onto a normal ward. The battle had been won, but the war was just beginning.



About the Author:
A 28 year old Aussie, from the beautiful South-East of Queensland, a lover of chocolate, good white wine and books, I'm an almost married mum to two, aged 1 and 3, who is pro-vax, pro-choice and pro-you do you. My partner and I run a small business from home.

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It's Just an Infection: Leaving

By The Tart From Down Under
Posted on Tuesday, July 5th, 2016

This post is a follow up to It’s Just an Infection.


Leaving the hospital without a loved one is the hardest thing anyone does, especially leaving with no knowledge of their well being. I don’t remember walking out, I don’t remember going home.  I remember Mr. Down Under’s parents being thrilled that their son was okay, that he would be okay. But to me, we didn’t know, he was being operated on, open heart surgery that could save his life, yes, that was true, but it was dangerous, and I was numb.

Our home at the time, had a large claw foot bath, with the shower head above it.   I remember sitting in that bath, with the water running over me, scalding hot and feeling like I was freezing. I sat there for a long time, watching the water drip.

After finally dragging myself out, I was taken out to dinner, “to celebrate”.  My parents, Mr. Down Under’s parents, and our friends that had been present during our time at the hospital went to a restaurant nearby.   After dinner, we went home and I finally went to sleep.

Waking up was surreal. I was alone, but could hear movement and loud talking in the house, but I felt wrong. It's hard to explain. Looking at the clock on my side table, I realised it was really early in the morning. My mum burst into the room holding my phone and repeating, "Hang on, hang on," over and over. It was Mr. Down Under’s Oma, she was scared, and with her thick accent my mum wasn’t sure what she was saying, I calmed her down and she told me that she didn't have his parents Australian number so she called me to find out if he was okay.

Now that I was up, I realised I didn’t know if he was okay. I calmed Oma down and promised to have someone call her back. I rang Mr. Down Under’s parents and they let me know that they spoke to the hospital this morning.  He was out of surgery. Rushing through breakfast with my Mum, we head to the hospital.

When we arrived at the hospital it was to an awake Mr. Down Under. I was so happy to see him, and he apologised for scaring me. He had had his breathing tube removed, so I was able to get in a kiss, but he still had some drainage tubes attached to the sides of his chest. The lung infection was mentioned, and that it may cause some issues with recovery, but nothing seemed dire. I spent the day sitting with Mr. Down Under relieved that he was going to be ok, and eventually was sent home by nurses at the end of visiting hours. After open heart surgery, Drs set patients up with a physio. Sitting and standing as soon as possible is crucial, it helps the patient to recover from their surgery. Mr. Down Under was to begin physio in the morning.

It never happened. Overnight there was a setback, speaking to his surgeon, he was worried, he had been worried. This is why he wanted to postpone the emergency surgery. Having heart surgery is a huge risk, having it while battling a lung infection is dangerous. Mr. Down Under’s oxygen saturation levels had dropped overnight making breathing difficult, he was placed on high pressured oxygen, which didn’t do much for his sparkling personality. I love the man, but he knows how to be a crank. Hospital and needles weren’t helping.

As I left the hospital that night I was stopped by Mr. Down Under’s nurse, Mia.  She told me that the Doctors had just completed their rounds, and that they were discussing sedating Mr. Down Under, and replacing his breathing tube. On the way home from the hospital we were called, the Doctor’s had decided it was the best course of action to help Mr. Down Under’s recovery. They sedated him that night, and to this day I feel awful that he went through that alone.


About the Author:
A 28 year old Aussie, from the beautiful South-East of Queensland, a lover of chocolate, good white wine and books, I'm an almost married mum to two, aged 1 and 3, who is pro-vax, pro-choice and pro-you do you. My partner and I run a small business from home.

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Married to Mental Illness: What Is Going On?

By Agent Tarter
Posted on Monday, July 4th, 2016

Before you can start helping someone with a mental illness, you have to know exactly what is wrong. Little did I know before my partner and I entered this process, that’s far harder than you might think.

My partner A. had always been anxious, something we both assigned to elements of his upbringing. Look up “insecure attachment” in a psychology textbook and you’ll have an idea of what it was like for him growing up. As he got older, he never knew what would result from his actions – whether he would be praised to high heaven or screamed at for being wrong – but chances were good that anything he did would be interpreted in the worst light possible.

During our Bachelor’s degree, the career that A. had planned on for nearly a decade fell through in spectacular fashion. Naturally, he became depressed. Between the anxiety and the depression, it was a very rocky couple of years, but we got through it. And that convinced us that both of those things were situational. Stick it out, we thought. Find a new career and be reassured through our relationship that he was worthy of love, and things would get better. And they did.

Sort of. Hindsight is 20/20, and looking back now, things weren’t really better. They were contained. But obsessive thoughts – like the terror he had that he might cheat, even though the very idea made him sick, or the fear that gripped him if I was late – were still lurking, just manageable. Compulsions were hiding in slight exaggerations of normal behavior – like how he needed to click “save” on his essays three times, then also save them to two separate flash drives, before he could sleep.

But who doesn’t have some quirks? So we didn’t think anything of it.

Things got worse again when our oldest, O., was born. We assumed that having a child had triggered some worries and issues from A.’s own childhood. Watching his mother and father respond to O. in a way that we knew was unhealthy opened A.’s eyes to just how dysfunctional the dynamic in his family was. No wonder he was anxious about being a good parent and depressed to realize that the relationship with his parents would never be want he wanted it to be. Right?

And it got worse again when our youngest, G., came around. By the time she was six months old, I was desperately frustrated, taking on too much, asking A. over and over again to get more significant help.

We moved; A. started a new job. But the pace was faster, and his career is one that is emotionally very draining. He kept taking on more and more; I kept trying to convince him that he didn’t need to ruin his happiness and his health just to prove his value. But when he literally couldn’t sleep for two days because he was worried about getting a project done, or when he was sure that an idle comment from a client meant that everyone he worked with hated him, he just brushed it off as that old but comparatively meek demon of anxiety – something he had fought before and surely could fight again.

There was one particularly bad summer that finally convinced him to see a doctor. The obvious stress came from external factors – a two-month span that was grueling and brutal for many reasons – but it was really just the reasoning that convinced him to go. And then we started the wait… Anyone who’s needed to see a specialist knows about waiting (even in the socialist health care paradise of Canada.) He wasn’t a risk to himself or to others, so he had to wait…and wait…and wait.

Meanwhile, his family doctor prescribed something appropriate for anxiety. And then another something when the first thing had unpleasant side effects and didn’t really seem to help. Then another something for depression, which replaced the thing for anxiety but only after a painful period weaning off one drug, then on to the next. Oh, and something to take as needed for the anxiety. I could give names of the pile of medications we tried, but really, that’s incidental. The fact was that our family doctor was pretty upfront: he didn’t know for sure what was going on, so he was essentially trying a “spray and pray” approach, trying the medications that were most common for the symptoms that were most bothersome and hoping they would help.

When A. finally got to see a psychiatrist and a counselor, the diagnosis was clinical depression. Major clinical depression, actually. Persistent depressive episodes – have you heard of dysthymia? Well, perhaps you’re actually bipolar with a tendency towards depressive episodes; you do sometimes get explosions of rage, which can be part of mania…

It is very disconcerting to realize that even the professionals know so little about mental health. That’s not their fault; psychiatry is really a very new discipline, so it’s probably on a par with surgery over 200 years ago. But when someone you love needs help, you just want someone to be able to run a test and say, confidently, that THIS is the problem and THIS is how you fix it.

The hard thing for me was constantly feeling like something wasn’t adding up. I can’t count how many times I said, “That’s an obsessive thought; should that be happening?” Or “What did your counselor say about your trouble sleeping?” Or “Did you ask the psychiatrist if it’s normal for your thoughts to be racing this much?”

In the end, it took a month long period of overwhelming, terrifying obsessive thoughts – thoughts that drove A. to considering suicide simply as a way to make them stop – before we got the right diagnosis: obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD.

This might seem obvious as I’m telling it, but go online sometime and look at the symptom lists for mental health and it’s shocking how much they overlap. In retrospect, it’s easy, but at the time, how could we distinguish the obsessive thoughts A. had that he was going to fail from fears that would be generated by social anxiety? How do you identify seemingly helpful habits – reviewing one more time for a test, insisting on checking that the doors are locked one more time before bed – as compulsions until you’ve put all the pieces together? And until you know what’s going on, the strategies that work for one disorder can make one disorder significantly worse.

So why am I telling you this story? Because if you’re living with a partner who is struggling with mental illness, there are some things you can learn from my story:

Diagnosis is not simple. Expect it to take time. That’s painful when you just want a solution, but counseling or medicating for the wrong thing is at best unhelpful and at worst can make things deteriorate.

Diagnosis is also based on self-reporting. In hindsight, I wish that I had gone to A.’s counselor to talk to her about what I was noticing in him, because I think he minimized some things and failed to mention others.

Don’t settle for a diagnosis that doesn’t seem to be working. Whether there’s something niggling at you that doesn’t seem to fit, or the medication that usually helps doesn’t, pursue it at least for a while. Mental health is complicated, so in the end it may simply be the complexities of the human mind that result in things not quite adding up, but if you have reason to feel like the diagnosis is missing something significant, follow up.

If someone you know is struggling with mental illness, have patience when their diagnosis seems to take a long time – or when it changes. It’s not as simple as getting a blood test or filling out a questionnaire and being able to say what’s wrong. And trust me, you are nowhere near as frustrated with the challenge of getting a diagnosis as the person who is desperate for help.

For those who aren’t dealing with mental illness personally or within their family, it’s time to push for further research to improve our understanding. Mental health care now is the equivalent of the days when we had just decided to anesthetize patients before surgery: it’s better than when we began, but it’s not sophisticated, it’s not consistent, and it’s not successful as often as it needs to be.

And we can change that.

About the Author:
Avid reader, budding writer, incessant singer. Married to a partner with OCD and parent of a child with autism. My opinions may be slanted by my experiences living in the socialist paradise of Canada.

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I Cheated On My Husband and Saved My Marriage

By Zootartia

Posted Thursday, June 23, 2016

I cheated on my husband. Go ahead, I’ll give you a moment to judge me. Seriously.  I don’t mind; up until very recently, I would have judged me too.  But I haven’t even gotten to the most controversial part yet… my affair kept me from getting a divorce.

I met my husband when I was 23 years old. I wasn’t looking for a serious relationship, and I was very much in that tumultuous time in your twenties filled with bad decisions and even worse boyfriends. I had just broken up with my boyfriend du jour (one of those delightfully dramatic on-again, off-again situations most of us have, unfortunately, experienced) and looking to just live it up for a bit.

One of my friends from high school had started working with my husband, and told me that she’d met the guy I was going to marry. I thought she was crazy, but entertained the idea and let her set us up.

A few dates later, and I called my best friend to tell her that I wasn’t sure if I could continue the relationship. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him, but because I knew my husband wasn’t the kind of guy you dated; he was the guy you married.

Marry him I did. Our relationship was not the most passionate I’d ever had, but it felt right. For the first time in my adult life, I felt happy, safe, and comfortable with a partner and I enjoyed my life with him more than I had ever enjoyed with anyone else. Our marriage was good, by anyone’s definition. We traveled, went out to bars and parties, and spent time with friends and family. Our sex was always, solidly, in the “enjoyable” category. After a couple of years, we decided to expand our family, and I got pregnant about 6 months later. A little over 3 years of marriage later, I had my daughter, and life as a family of three suited us perfectly. I was happy.

But, I hear you shouting, happy people don’t cheat on their husbands! When I struck up my affair, I would have argued that they do. I was convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was happy.  When my daughter was almost 1, I ended up having a very brief affair with a colleague of mine that I’d had a major flirtation with for the better part of a decade. My affair was about sex. That kind of crazy, no holding back, just about having a good time sex.   I never had any intentions of leaving my husband for him, and actually convinced myself that sex with him would make me a better wife to my husband. My affair was with the kind of guy I sought before I settled down and realized just how bad they were for me. We slept together twice; my husband found out through some salacious gchat messages he saw on my computer about a week before our daughter’s first birthday party.

I thought my marriage was over; I would have never stayed with someone who’d had an affair, and my husband had always made it clear that he would never stay either. I didn’t blame him for leaving, but begged and begged for him to give our relationship 6 months of marriage counseling before filing for divorce. I figured that any divorce proceedings and custody battles would be better handled when emotions had cooled a bit, and we’d had a professional mediating the relationship. For the sake of our daughter, he agreed.

We started marriage counseling, and after the first couple of sessions, we both decided to actually really give our marriage a try. We quickly realized that there were many things in our relationship that led to my affair. I was keeping my sexual preferences a secret from him. Not to give away too much, but there are some scenes of 50 Shades of Grey that I’ve enjoyed in the bedroom. My husband didn’t have a clue. Any attempts for him to be “rough” in bed, got quickly shut down by me, so he thought I wasn’t interested. He didn’t have a “Madonna/Whore” complex, but apparently I did. My own insecurities boxed me into the role of wife and mother, and without consulting my partner, I decided he wouldn’t want to be married to that “type of girl.” It made it really easy for me to look outside my marriage to get that kind of release.

My husband, on the other hand, comes from an immigrant family that often did things “old school.” Emotions weren’t discussed. Problems weren’t aired out. He was keeping his frustrations with me, our sex life, and our overall relationship under lock and key, and because he wasn’t communicating, he was slowly pulling away. I come from a world filled with lawyers, where no one ever shuts up and everything is constantly being discussed. My constant communication was overwhelming him and contributing to a bigger gap in our relationship.

When we started counseling, the therapist asked us to rate our marriage before the affair. We both gave it an 8. After a month of therapy, we realized pre-counseling we were maybe at a 4 or 5. Our marriage was broken, and we didn’t even know. After months of therapy, we started to communicate better. We stopped having the same fight every two weeks. Our sex life improved. We started to remember why we fell in love.

Looking back, I am so grateful that I had an affair. I am happier now with my husband that I ever have been in the 8 years we have been together. We are more open, honest and respectful of each other than we ever were before. Without my affair, we never would have gone to therapy and I truly don’t think our marriage would have survived the long haul without it. When talking to my husband, we both realize that if this hadn’t happened, we would have woken up one day and realized far too late that we had drifted too far apart to save our relationship. Without my affair, I would have ended up divorced.

About the Author:

I'm a married, New Jersey mom who spends works her day job planning events, and spends 24 hours a day trying to figure out how to be the best mom I can be to a "spirited” daughter. I love football, ice cream, the beach, working out, binge watching Netflix, and judging people who don't vaccinate their kids.

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