Thanks for the messages, YaYa and pedwards, I really appreciate it. I hope everyone is doing okay. I will try to join some of the Tuesday phone calls when I can.
I need to figure out a way to pretend when I’m around my husband that I’m okay, it is just too stressful for him if I’m honest about my pain levels. Does anyone else have experience with that? I wish I could just be myself, but that isn’t working. For example, today the pain levels felt like complete torture, and I just wanted to be able to acknowledge to him that it was really rough, but he got really upset about me mentioning it without phrasing it exactly the way he wanted me to (e.g., making it very clear that I felt optimistic about my overall progress, but was having a rough day). If I feel I have to tell someone about feeling awful, that’s exactly when I’m not able to remember the magic way I am supposed to phrase things…
The other side of things that’s really, really difficult is physical intimacy, to be honest. It’s tough for me to enjoy it due to my pain levels, but for him to be willing to try it I need to act like I’m completely fine, and come up with some kind of elaborate foreplay so he will forget how angry he is about years of not being able to be intimate very much. It’s far more than I’m usually able to muster, and I’m beyond exhausted about it. I wish it were feasible to go to couples counseling together, but that’s not an option, so it is completely up to me to figure out a way to get us out of this mess, when it is already taking superhuman efforts to just keep going day after day and try to juggle my creative work, taking care of the house, etc.
Anyway, I hope y’all are doing better than I am, sigh.
-Ryan