From family hero to nursing case? When Dad suddenly stops working
It's stupid with luck. A memory, a photo, music, a smell, and suddenly you know that you were happy at the moment. Only you did not notice it there. I blow the dust from the tent, which fell from the cupboard while mucking. Skandika Montana? for eight people. Henrik had bought it for our tent holiday experiment. If so, then right? He had said? and then spent three hours fighting on the campsite of Barcelonnette with the tent poles and a Chinese assembly instructions. Klara, Luki and I kept laughing when Maxi asked: "Daddy, how can it be that all those who arrived two hours after us throw their chops on the grill and we are still here with yours Luxury tent rumdoktern ??
Care case after cerebral infarction
One can reminisce as in a picture book, and presumably from the outside we were just that: a family of picture books. Three wonderful children (today 17, 21 and 24 years), two successful careers, an intact marriage, a large circle of friends, a chic old apartment and a holiday home on the Baltic Sea. What could be more demanding of life? It was our first and last camping attempt, and maybe what was supposed to unsettle our family was already in the tent with us: a small, underhanded blood clot. At some point he must have formed Henrik's heart and wandered from there to his head. Finally, on a Wednesday morning at 7:10 am in the shower to plug a vessel and disturb the circulation of Henrik's brain. Ischemic cerebral infarction is called that, and it sounded like a sack of potatoes falling from the truck: dull and clumsy. "Daddy did not really lie down in the shower right?" Maxi said. And I called into the bathroom: "Should we install a senior seat shower, honey? And then we snorted. Henrik is pretty quick-witted so we expected his backfire. But nothing came. Then I found him lying in the shower, his face crooked as if it had slipped off his bones.
What happens after the stroke?
The black areas that the neurologist later showed me on computed tomography look like the Mecklenburg Lake District. It lies in the middle of Henrik's forehead and his right brain. Every black lake is destroyed brain tissue. Beyond repair. The consequences: left-sided paralysis, cognitive disorders, personality changes. "You have to be prepared for the fact that your husband is no longer the old man," said the doctor, and I thought: Yes, but we can get it back to Lukis Abi-Ball. Nothing of what the doctor was trying to explain came to me. Maybe it's a protective instinct that wants to save you from reality because you can only endure it piecemeal.
I do not know what happened to Henrik until today. Since the stroke he lives in his own world. It is a world full of Porsches, blondes, sporting and professional excellence. Sometimes he is very clear and realizes his condition, which binds him to the wheelchair until today, then again he signs up for a triathlon or applies for loans for a company foundation. Sometimes he would like to take part in an electric scooter start-up (as managing director, what else?), Sometimes found a shipping company (investment sum: almost 25 million). Henrik was felt his whole life the boss, most recently CFO of a shipping company? why should it suddenly be different? Just because a small blood clot entered his life?
According to the doctors, it was atrial fibrillation that triggered the clot and put a stop to our lives. Should I have perceived it? You can hear it when the heart beats irregularly. When was the last time my head lay on his chest? For 23 years this breast was a rock in my life. A clever, witty rock. Nothing could upset him. Henrik is an alpha animal. Mothers want their husbands for such a husband: responsibly, successfully, always with a dose of maladjustment. Presumably, it is exactly this portion, which now regularly goes on 1-2-3.tv with him, because teleshopping works great with one hand. New deliveries are coming to us every day: ceramic pan sets, diamond rings, women's stretch jeans (he thought I've gained weight) and pallets of gastro-toilet blocks that he wanted to sell. "Henrik, is not that possible ?, I said at some point. I felt miserable. I knew that he meant well. That he wanted to give me a pleasure, to provide a contribution to the family business. But sooner or later it would ruin us. Since when do you really crave teleshopping ?? I asked. And he said, "Barbara," and looked at me with his board face. "That's under-layer television, I would never do that."
Torture by the orderlies
Sometimes both of us can laugh loudly at such things, but I never know when he will hug me and when he will be in his world. Of course, old Henrik would never have ordered toilet blocks, but he said goodbye to us on a Wednesday morning. It hurts to let him go, to realize that now a new Henrik is with us. Although he is in many ways the old man: his humor, his repartee and the mischievous way in which I have fallen in love, are still fully there. Henrik's language center has been completely spared from the attack on his brain. For this, areas were created that are responsible for perceptions, emotions, the assessment of time, space and reality. "The central control in the brain is out of time," explained the doctors. Characteristic changes are therefore purely organic and therefore excuse. This is easier said than it is, because the new Henrik is characterized by one thing: rage. It is directed against carers, doctors, therapists, the injustice of life, the children and of course against me, the source of all evil. At some point he has? just against? bitch? and since then I have been guilty of depriving, restraining, manipulating children and friends, and torturing unwary carers.
After Henrik's release from rehab, the doctors had two suggestions: retirement home for the elderly (mid-50s) or care at home. No one could tell me how to do it with a full-time job, school-age children and a half-paralyzed man. So I hired a nursing agency, which sends us alternately Eastern European caregivers, because for German I would need two full-time jobs. The first caregiver suffered a feeble affection, which caused me to have two cases of nursing at home, the second one threw out after three days (? Henrik evil, very angry?), The third one told him that I was a witch who needed to be fumigated (the Stench was still stuck with us for weeks), the fourth was great, but never came back, and the fifth was full from noon like a howitzer. He probably could not bear it without vodka, because there was a war in our home. Everyone escaped into his room to escape Henrik's gunfire from the living room. Maxi and I communicated almost exclusively via WhatsApp.
Sometimes I wonder how all this would have ended if Luki, our eldest son, had not put the knife on my chest before moving out. "I only go if you part with Papi," he said. "Otherwise you go to the dogs and Maxi too." And as if such a sentence of his own son was not bad enough, was even worse that he was right. I just did not want to admit it. As well as? I had no right to complain. It had not hit me. I can walk, work and do all that Henrik would like to do. It is so unfair. Is it even right to part with a sick man?
The separation is a huge relief
To make it short: I separated? spatially at least. Have our everyday life spread over two apartments. In one live Henrik and the orderlies, in the other Maxi and me. Henrik claims the bitch made him homeless. Unfortunately also at the hearing of the district judge during the care process, but that's another story. For me, the separation is a huge relief. It allows me and the children from Monday to Friday a normal everyday life and gives me strength for the weekends with Henrik. Of course, I often wonder if that was all right. But who knows what is right and wrong? Especially when you're with someone who lives off the norm.
I know that if Henrik had the choice, he would not be with us anymore. In the light moments in which the psychopharmaceutical reality finds him, he told me. But none of us can decide about life and death. We must take the life as it comes, and try to make the best out of it. I have no right to detain him. But as long as he's there, I'll be there for him. Or, to put it in words, he will not get rid of the bitch.
