I probably would never talk this with anyone who knows me in real life, people won’t understand. But it’s online and I need an outlet. And it’s just becoming overwhelming. Perhaps I am just over-concerned, hysteria maybe. Hope I could feel better once I sort it out in words.

A vista opened out just for a minute before this holiday, short family trip, and all the fun we could have in the neighborhood, food, natural beauty and pure joy of being together. However, the blackness shut down again. The blackness has another name as “midlife crisis” or more precisely, husband’s health, physically or probably mentally. 

My husband felt dizzy, so we went to the hospital. Brain scan showed he had minor cerebral atherosclerosis. It’s not something you can shrug it off. You need to take precautions, regular exercising, eating healthier and taking pills. I guess it’s part of midlife where your body simply is going down.

Some people might just leave it at that. They just elevate their nose with a sniff of indifference and dismiss it from their minds and go on with their life. I am one of them. I know that’s not sensible. My husband, on the contrarily, goes to another extreme. It worries him to death, occupying his whole mind, turning him into a total stranger. Honestly, I don’t know which side is worse.

I should see it coming. I have married him long enough to be on my guard against this fatal tendency of his. Still I don’t understand why someone who can handle pressures so well, either at work or in family, would be so panicked and scared to get sick?

Now life stretches before him—endless—in a series of days darkened and poisoned by his physical problems. Like that is going to help! No, I know better, how could his anxiety, his worries would worsen his condition, multiple times worsen.

I really got sick of going from one doctor to another, putting him through one treatment to anther which did him no good, repeating words that supposed to be comforting but actually not, and hearing his worries, his endless complaints of pains. And I’m not sure this time we could be lucky enough to stumble across one doctor, not any doctor but must be the doctor of the best—only that he would listen—and that doctor must speak truth and speak it in a vehement way: “A lot of people are worse than you. I’m worse than you. Stop whining, man up and find a job, get back to your life! You should feel luck that your wife is still there. You are in my black list, I would not waste any of my time in you.”  

That’s pretty much what happens in last year when he was diagnosis as slipped disc. I really, really didn’t want to go through that nightmare again.

You know what is the worst part? The worst part is, after going through all these, when coming to his health condition, I can’t trust him. When he feels terrible, I’m not sure if it’s a physical one or a mental one. And my mistrust him irritates him a lot, and we fight over it like a thousand times. Now I’m trying to hide my mistrust, but honestly, I don’t succeed very much.

There is nothing I could do about it. Because it’s his battle, his demon to fight. Saying “don’t worry”, or “it’s not the end of the world”, or “calm down” don’t work—these words would just roll off him like water off a duck’s back.

They say that anxiety and depression isn’t contagious. That’s wrong. It’s highly contagious, indeed, only to one who is the closest to the patient.

I’m so, so, so tired.