Chapter 4

My issues of the previous 43 years have caught up to me at different times of my life.

I knew I wasn't taking care of my health. I wasn't taking care of my job. I certainly wasn't taking care of my husbandly role.

My doctor, family doctor for 20 years, left me a message on the weekend I was contemplating an end to it all.

He said that he really wished to keep seeing me but that, after a year of not heeding his reminder calls, he felt that if I did not want to continue in his care, he would understand, and drop me from his ranks.

Somehow, in the little place that our self preservation resides, I took this challenge he had presented to me and made an appointment with him that Monday for a time to see him on Wednesday.

I was nervous; I knew he would take my blood pressure (high), and want to schedule blood work (A1C especially; I had been borderline diabetic the last I had seen him).

Somehow, from some little space in my mind, I was able to relate to him my feelings of despair. I did not know where they were coming from, but I knew that I was burned out, rung out, and looking for a way out.

He discussed with me a lot of different topics and made me aware of the fact that I could take time off from work if my employer had a leave of absence program; in this case they did and I would be going on short term disability.

When I first approached my wife, she was shocked that I would need to take a short-term leave of absence.

Perhaps she had a premonition of the long term disability I would be facing later in the year.

I'm not sure.

But it was a long discussion filled with screaming and hateful words and, though I wanted to run and hide, I hung in there explaining what I was going through.

I do not believe she understood, nor believed me, that I had gotten to a point of contemplating suicide. She could not understand. It was not on her radar at all.