Waiting for the Fontan

Well, I should probably take my own advice from my post about losing control but my daughter's third open heart surgery is not going to happen when I thought it was going to happen.  No, I am not in control of this situation -- lather, rinse, repeat.  You'd think I would get this by now!

My daughter's Pulmonary Atresia diagnosis comes with a three stage surgery plan from birth until about two and half year's old.  We have learned countless times during this journey that you can never quite know what to expect or when you can expect it so I probably shouldn't have been surprised when her cardiologist contacted us to let us know that after discussing it with her surgeon, her surgery would in fact not be this fall but "sometime" next year.  We'll have a follow-up cardiology appointment in December, they will see where things are at, and we'll take it from there.

I have to be honest.  I was really really really disappointed to hear this.  I could hear myself telling friends and family and their reaction being, "Oh that's great news!  You have even more time to just enjoy life and not worry about going back into the hospital as soon as October -- that's great!"  And they wouldn't be entirely wrong in saying that -- we do get to enjoy life some more without a surgery staring us in the face over the next couple of months -- that's true -- but in all honesty until the plan changed I didn't realize how much I had been relying on it staying the same.

Here's the thing.  Since the diagnosis back in October of 2009, I sort of knew that, god willing, if we got through the pregnancy, the birth, the first surgery (the BT Shunt), the second open heart (the Glenn) and then the third open heart (the Fontan) -- we would have made it through a hell of a lot.  And I knew if I was lucky enough to get to the third and final surgery, then holy shit -- we'd have our kid.  That would mean she would have made it.  A kid -- who in all honesty if she was born just thirty years ago when this three stage surgery wasn't even in existence -- would not have survived.

It's kind of a weird thing to look at your kid and have to actually comprehend that the little person in front of you wasn't physically meant to be standing there -- it may sound kind of cruel and any parent would have a hard time thinking about their child like that.  A lot of people would (and do) say to me, "Oh, Molly you can't think like that -- she WAS meant to survive -- just look at her -- that's why she's here!"  But anatomy is anatomy.  The hard cold facts are she was born with half a heart and the word on the street is -- humans kinda need the whole heart to live.  She just wasn't born with the equipment she needed to live.  Period.  End of story.    

Well, that is of course until these freakin brilliant, amazing, probably kind of insane (let's be honest) doctors and surgeons spent their entire lifetimes studying the crap out of this super complicated shit, talked some people into trusting them enough with their kids lives to take the bull by the horns and have their kids be the first, second, and third people to ever even TRY what originally was an experimental surgery -- so that thirty years later they've figured out a way to rewire a one ventricle heart so that it can run a human body.  And the result is this:

I have my daughter.  We can be a family now simply because these surgeries were invented and they make it so she can be in our lives.  Kind of an amazing thing to wrap your head around every morning when you hear her little voice through the monitor as she plays pretend and talks to her stuffed animals in her crib.  I can't even tell you how much I hated science and math growing up.  Now I owe my family and my future to it.

So, we've got this last hurdle ahead of us and while they moved the finish line a bit further down the track than I first expected -- she's been doing so well -- how can I even think of complaining.  It wasn't like cardiology was like, "Uh...she doesn't look so hot you gotta get her back in here and we gotta do the Fontan STAT."  Which honestly, happens to many heart kids and their families who are really struggling to get through these three major interventions before the age of three.  Not every kid does so well having their chest cut open every 6-9 months for the first three years of their lives, and expecting half of a heart to keep oxygenating your blood so you can breath, while maintaining the function of all your other organs including your brain -- well...it's asking a lot of that one ventricle.  I tell ya, if that one ventricle could talk....I'm sure it would have more of a truck driver's mouth than even I do with the list of complaints it must have -- feeling all angry and used from being the one stuck holding the bag, trying to keep a person alive with just half the horse power it needs.  But I digress...imagining myself as a single ventricle...  

Instead, they said she has done exceptionally well -- better than they could have ever expected especially given that she had been on ECMO as a newborn.  She has maintained growth, has shown no early indications of any major learning disabilities or neurological issues, and with loads of physical therapy -- she's even walking now.  They are totally blown away.  Not as much as we are of course -- but they still think she's pretty awesome :)  But they did have to remind me that she has a particular kind of heart circulation where her coronary arteries are dependent on her right ventricle (the ventricle she doesn't have) and in order to achieve the best outcomes during the next open heart they are going to have to do what they call the extra cardiac Fontan.  And they'd feel better doing her next open heart when she's a bit bigger and a bit older.  So, fine.  That's the deal.  You don't really get a say in these kinds of situations no matter how chatty you are :)

So, I had to face the fact that whether I realized it or not, I have been holding my breath waiting for this next step to be behind us.  I thought by the time the holidays rolled around we'd be on the road to recovery, I thought my son would be just over one year old and it wouldn't be too much of a burden on the rest of my family to care for him while we lived in the hospital with my daughter.  I thought we'd head into 2013 and really be able to say...we'd made it.  The open heart's are over and we can begin to live a normal life like everybody else without any major interventions ahead of us for the near and distant future.

But that's okay.  This is how it was meant to be, I just didn't know it yet.  She'll be older -- which will be tough because she's already so verbal and aware of everything around her.  No matter whether she's two and half or three and half -- it's still going to be hard to explain to her why we are being admitted to the hospital and why she's got tons of tubes and wires coming out of her after surgery.  Why she went laughing and giggling into the hospital one day and then woke up the next feeling absolutely shitty in some foreign place called 8 East with tons of nurses and CA's poking and prodding her around the clock for days.  Why she has a massive incision on her chest (again), and why mommy and daddy are letting this happen and "putting" her through so much pain.  These were the things I was starting to gear myself up for that I'm just going to have to put on the back burner and face next year.

My son will be older, too -- which I also didn't picture -- but thankfully he'll still be young enough that he also won't remember any of this.  It's the families I have met who have other children (five years old and up) the older siblings to the heart baby -- it's hard for them to see their little brother or sister in the hospital like this and to see Mum and Dad so wrought with concern.  It's hard for those little minds to absorb this kind of thing and have "faith" that everything and everyone is going to be ok.

Thankfully, both my daughter and my son won't remember much if any of this at all.  And when they are teenagers, they will be rolling their eyes at me and their father saying, "I have no idea why they are always so worried about us -- we're FINE -- Jesus, can't you guys just relax?"  Oh, we wish we could kids....we wish we could....

Well, I better come up for air and take another HUGE freakin breath because I'm going to be holding it for a while now.  But you know what?  Until then?  I'm just going to have to let go thinking I have any say in any of this heart mom crap and just enjoy the hell out of this:

Bird Shit

It's 90 degrees here in Boston.  I have two small kids with Irish complexions.  One just started walking and the other one just started sitting up without assistance.  Even if they were both Olympic God medalists "cooling off" at the beach isn't' really an option for us (which is so annoying because the beach is literally four blocks from my house).  Between all of the sand my ten month old son would likely eat combined with all three of us probably spontaneously combusting because of the sun -- it's in our best interest to find alternatives to the beach to try and cool off on days like this.

Cooling off means either braving the outdoors, setting up the kiddie pool or the sprinkler, wearing factor 50 and about as many layers of clothing as we would in the winter -- or we try to find things to do in the house in front of one of our AC units.  Once everyone's had enough of being trapped indoors, we might get brave and venture out to find a place that takes very little effort to get to and will have AC when we get there.  Oh, and maybe ice cream.

I'm having one of the those days where more is working against me than working for me.  So, once it finally cools off (meaning the temperature dropped to like 87 degrees) the decision is to walk the kids over to a new frozen yogurt shop.

On the way back a bird shits on my face.  Literally.  It hit me right above the eye and then dropped a second sample which slowly dripped down my arm.  It was warm.  I was warm.  This made for just about the most disgusting combination of sensations I've had in a long time (besides last summer when I was pregnant during heat like this and therefore I experienced a variety of disgusting sensations pretty much every day until I gave birth on September 1st).

I forgot to bring the wipes.  Which I originally thought the most annoying thing about this would be what more do you need than a freakin package of wipes when you are feeding your two children soft serve ice cream.  Alas, not having the wipes would turn out to be a much bigger bummer than I could have imagined.  Now, I can't wipe the bird shit off myself.  It's just going to have to stay there until I get back to the house and please god don't let me sweat so much that it just melts into my skin and runs down my entire face and left side of my body.

So, naturally, I start to kick it into high gear so I can get my ass back to the house and get this disgusting shit off my face.  I'm walking down the hill pushing the double stroller in this god awful heat, a breeze finally kicks in, which in any other given moment I would have been super thankful for since it's been one of those days where there is has been no circulation of air.  But no, this breeze is not my friend -- it's making the bird shit dry and actually harden on my face.

You know, sometimes you can just be an adult about things, get shit on by a bird and just laugh it off.  Not today.  Today, I'm taking this personally.  Mr. Bird and Mr. Breeze can find some other poor sap to make the butt of their joke.  Instead this is just one of those super-trying-stay-at-home-mom-kind-of-days that ends in actually having someone (ok fine, to be fair, something) shit in your face -- adding insult to injury.  

It's the end of the day, I'm an exhausted mother of two, who is not exactly the freshest daisy on the street at this particular moment -- between the sweat, the sunscreen, the ice cream, and now the bird shit -- I am the literal definition of a Hot Mess.  

Really, was shitting on my eye really necessary, Mr. Bird?  And what do YOU have to say for yourself Mr. Breeze?  (Obviously, in this instance, Mr. Bird and Mr. Breeze double as two adolescent Southie punks wreaking havoc on East Broadway and it is my job as Super Mom to reprimand them for their terrible behavior).

You can't help but think in moments like these -- is some super natural power just having a laugh right now at my expense?  There wasn't anyone else you guys wanted to shit on on East Broadway besides me?  

Losing Control

Having a child who has to undergo multiple open heart surgeries obviously is a scary and hard thing to go through.  I guess in a weird way having my first born be the one with the "special circumstances" is a good thing (if you can even say that any part of her heart condition is actually "good").  She's my base line, she's the control sample.  Before the birth of my healthy son, I literally didn't know any different than what I experienced with my daughter.  As insane as it was, it was my "normal."

"Normal" meant the following: stressful pregnancy, scheduled induction, baby born, baby taken away, baby stabilized in NICU, baby transferred to Children's Hospital Cardiac Intensive Care Unit, wheeled over to CICU to meet baby for first time, baby undergoes heart surgery at four days old, baby comes out of surgery on life support, baby lives in ICU on life support for one week, I live at home postpartum without my baby, baby comes off life support, baby recovers enough to be transferred to recovery floor, I live with baby at hospital for four weeks under heavy monitoring, I learn how to take care of cardiac baby from nurses, baby finally comes home after five weeks.  Before my healthy son, that was all I knew.

And just like most parents learn with their first child -- healthy or not -- you are not in control of anything.  I think anyone who has had a child will tell you it's a humbling experience to learn that while you are the one 100% responsible, 100% accountable, and 100% in charge of this little human -- you tend to feel like you are the exact opposite.  The baby won't stop crying.  The baby doesn't like it when I change it's diaper.  The baby won't latch.  The baby won't take a bottle.  The baby won't sleep.  The baby sleeps too much....and on and on and on.  In those first weeks and sometimes months you sincerely feel like you have absolutely no qualifications for this job and it's just a matter of time before social services comes knocking on your door saying "Now, come on Mrs. Mollygog.  How long did you think you could get away with this?  You clearly have no idea what you're doing.  Now hand me the baby and we'll find a more experienced/capable person to raise this human."  Honestly, on some exceptionally bad days, I was hoping that exchange with social service would actually happen, I felt so damn bad for the baby.

Well, add an extremely rare congenital heart defect to your first time of ever having had baby and you learn even faster that You.  Are.  Not.  In.  Control.  

Once we made it home, we were given a binder where we had to record every ounce of liquid that made it in and out of our baby 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  We had special powders and formulas we had to add to my breast milk (which made me feel like I was back in Mr. Clark's 7th grade science class doing the "sludge test." And anyone who knows me knows I was terrible at both math and science.  Uh-oh baby -- try to hang in there!)  Oh, and we had to feed the high caloric sludge to her every three hours around the clock for 7+ months.  

We were sent home with a scale and an oxymeter and asked to record weights/readings twice a day.  We had visiting nurses.  We had weekly phone calls with our team at Children's and we had many, many, follow-up appointments with all kinds of specialists (audiology, neurology, GI...).  Don't get me wrong we needed all these specialists/nurses in our lives directing our every move.  And being forced to track all of this information for what felt like every minute of everyday actually tricked us into thinking at times that we were in control of the uncontrollable.  But it was also hard to be under such scrutiny.  What if we made a mistake?  What if the numbers start going down?  What if she rejects the formula and doesn't grow enough in time for her next surgery?  Somehow, we've miraculously made it this far with all the help in the world at Children's but what if we fuck it up now that we're home?  Will the doctors say THEY did all they could but in the end it was actually US that screwed it all up?  It was a wee bit stressful.  

Any parent of a newborn is terrified they are doing something wrong.  Why won't she burp?  Why does her poop look like that?  Is it ok that she's been in the swing that long?  I haven't changed a wet diaper in a while....oh god, is she dehydrated?  The second guessing just doesn't stop.  Thankfully, in our situation (so I guess you can categorize this under "Good Things About Having a Baby with a Heart Condition") I either had the binder to refer to my last mistake (I mean accomplishment), or I had about eight different nurses/specialists I could call day or night to ask these kinds of questions to and who would reassure me that either everything was ok or everything was not ok and to bring her back into the hospital.  

There has never been a single moment since she was conceived where we've felt in control of our daughter's future.  If anything we felt as out of control as any parent-to-be feels about the future of their unborn baby.  Will we be good parents?  Will we be able to keep her safe from drugs, alcohol, car accidents?  Will we be able to afford to pay for her to go to college?  Will she chose a good partner to be with?  But once we got her diagnosis when I was five months pregnant we had those worries and then some other ones.  Will she live?  What if she makes it through the first surgery but not the second?  What if she makes it through the first two but not the third?  What will her quality of life be like?  Will she need special machines to live?  Will she be able to do regular things?  Will she be able to have children of her own someday if she wants to?  If she does survive all three surgeries, how long can she be expected to live?  If, god forbid, we ever were to lose her, would our marriage be able to survive something like that?  

My point is, there have been many lessons in becoming a heart mom. The biggest lesson of them all might just have to be that no matter how hard I try, no matter how much I think I can --  I simply cannot control this situation.  Yah, that might just be the biggest lesson so far.  

So far, we've made it through two open heart surgeries, a couple of caths, and we survived ECMO unscathed (which is most definitely not always the case).   I haven't been back to work since Feb 23, 2010.  Oh, and I had another baby (which between me and you was a surprise -- will save THAT for another post).  But we've never felt in control of any of it.  

And even in spite of what at times has felt like losing control of literally everything, we still have our little girl, our little boy, our marriage, and even a tiny bit of our sanity.

It's a miracle, folks.  A downright miracle.  

Echo of Hope

If it didn't happen to me as often as it does I wouldn't think anything of it.  But life has a way of putting you exactly where you need to be right when you need to be there.

Here's what happened today.  Looking for something to do with the kids for our "morning activity" together, I decided to finally deliver two cases of Elecare baby formula to the Boston Children's Hospital GI floor.  Considering I'd been sitting on it since my daughter outgrew her food allergy over a year ago I needed to get this stuff over to the hospital and put to good use before it expired.

I know they call breast milk liquid gold -- and believe me it is -- but this Elecare stuff is LITERALLY liquid gold when breast milk either just won't cut it for a sick baby or the breast milk ends up making an already sick baby more sick -- which as a breast feeding mother is an awful thing to have to go through. It's also $50 bucks a can.  Imagine?  So, I loaded up my two little monkeys into the car with our precious Elecare delivery and off to Children's we go.

Children's is amazing.  It is also heart wrenching, humbling, and the miracles and tragedies that go on every minute of every day there -- well, let's just say that calling it a "remarkable" place doesn't even cut it.  Because we've spent so much time there -- either literally living there and roaming the halls in our PJ's for weeks at a time or spending anywhere from 45 minutes to 8 hours at follow-up appointments and procedures -- it's always nice to go when we don't have anything official on the docket.  Like our visit today.

The place is always buzzing like mad.  There are literally thousands of people there at any given moment, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  A kid could be getting a broken leg re-casted or a mole removed and another kid is in a fight for their life having open heart surgery or brain surgery.  It's pretty, um, "remarkable."  And because it's so damn busy it's not SUPER likely you are going to run into someone you know or any of your kid's doctor's, surgeon's, or therapists -- but when you do, it's pretty awesome.

So, today -- after dropping off the Elecare (to my daughter's-cardiologist's-wife who happens to be a GI doctor-- go figure) I'm pushing my double stroller through the lobby and just about to leave when a guy passes me who I swear is the dad of a five month old baby boy with a very serious heart condition who's blog I've been following called Echo of Hope.

As I've said before, it's hard to find blogs or even care pages that are similar to your own story because obviously each child's situation/story is so different -- but when another heart mom friend forwarded the Echo of Hope blog to me -- I really got sucked in because some of what this family has been through and nearly almost everyone they have on their "dream team" of specialists (as the dad likes to call them) are our peeps too.  To top it off, this family actually went through the fetal intervention surgery before the baby was born that we didn't end up having to go through (a heart surgery they perform through the mother's uterus on the fetus -- sounds like fun, right?)  When your diagnosis is as rare as ours is -- the inner circle of who can even help you gets REALLY small -- and this team of people are only found at Boston Children Hospital so you have to get to Boston in order to hope for a miracle.  When I read this dad's blog I became an immediate fan for a number of reasons.  Usually heart blogs/care pages are written by the moms.  A blogging heart dad is like spotting a rare animal on safari.  Once I realized Echo of Hope was written by a heart Dad -- I thought, wow, this is pretty cool.  Then I realized the family wasn't from Iceland or China like some of the other families I've met -- they are from freakin Stowe, MA.  Oh, and he's a super talented writer and is funny as hell.  How funny is open heart surgery on a newborn, you ask?  Go check out his blog.  He's awesome.  I got pretty hooked into keeping little Ari in my thoughts from day-to-day and praying that he gets to be a two and half year old someday too.

This is not the first time I've stalked other heart families at Children's.  I can save those stalker/totally random stories for another post.  But my previous track record of trying to find other families like my own would tell you that there is no way in hell I was going to let this guy walk right by me and not say anything in order to find out if it's actually him.  Why not beat the odds of how rare all this crap is in the first place and at least attempt to make a connection that could be in itself almost just as rare?  So, I pull a double stroller U-turn and start following him saying, "Excuse me, Mike?  Are you baby Ari's Dad?  Do you write Echo of Hope?"  He looks a little stunned because I don't think you start a blog about your kid having a heart condition and then expect immediate on-the-street fame from it -- but we start to chat once he realizes I'm not paparazzi.  I introduce him to my daughter, tell him she has Pulmonary Atresia, that we have the same "dream team" and that we were also considered for a fetal intervention surgery when I was pregnant.   This is the kind of banter a heart mom will throw around to show her street cred and to prove to the other heart parent that we're legit and down with the struggle.  It would be easier if the Advanced Fetal Care Center at Children's gave us all some kind of badge we could flash, like the FBI have, so we can skip all that crap and get straight to the "heart" of the matter :)

He's in the phase where they are living at the hospital so he was very open to the distraction of having his wife and mother-in-law come down from the CICU and join me and my little ones for lunch.  It was kind of an insane impromptu get together given I had the two kids with me and they were all over the place -- but I can't really describe just how awesome it is for families like ours to find each other not only literally amidst the sea of madness that is Children's Hospital but also emotionally when we're riding a roller coaster that is so individually our own and we feel like no one could ever really know how turned upside down our lives actually are.  And thankfully my family's life has been turned back to an upright standing position again.  Let's hope the same happens for this family.

But these guys are IN IT right now -- their little guy has a different diagnosis than my daughter with a different technical plan for getting this kid to survive his diagnosis and he's already five months old and struggling to get out of the woods just enough that he can grow a little bit more before having additional interventions.  But their day-to-day right now is pretty similar to what we went through during the beginning of our own daughter's life in that that they just aren't sure where things are going right now or where they are going to end up.  Hearing our story, meeting my daughter and laying eyes on a kid that really just looks like any other toddler on the street meant a lot to them.  But you know it has to be hard.  You have to imagine -- you have your little five month old upstairs in the CICU and you are praying that the hell you are currently living in is going to someday result in a little toddler, running around, laughing and giggling and sitting on your lap.  We know because we were sitting in their shoes two years ago praying for the same thing.  It's never a guarantee for heart families and none of us ever know in the beginning when the doctors are trying to figure out what they can and can't do just how our individual stories are all going to end.

But that being said, I knew from this Dad's blog that he has taken this situation and put up an unbelievable fight for his little guy, just like any parent would, with the strength, courage and humor you need to get through something like this.  I'm a big believer in humor having the ability to get you through pretty much any shitty situation in life.  I think Ari's dad would agree.  Even if you know nothing about having a sick kid or heart conditions or any of that crap -- his blog is awesome.  Not my crappy online journaling kind of blog -- his is like a legit amazing I-want-to-sign-up-for-updates-from-this-blog kind of blog.

Totally awesome encounter.  Another day, another heart family stalked and found by mollygog.  I am so glad that I waited over a year to drop off that Elecare formula so I could randomly walk by this guy in a crowded lobby and have it turn out to be another amazing heart family.  For all the hard days there have always been special days like today sprinkled in that are like a little gift from heaven.

And a shout out to whoever's job it is up in heaven to coordinate the accidental meeting of families like ours  -- you've got a pretty sweet guardian angel gig up there in the Big House.   Job well done.

Therapy

Everyone goes to therapy, right?

No?

Huh, I was sure therapy was required by law for anyone with a pulse that lives with or near other human beings.  Well, there definitely should be a law if you think about it.

Life is hard enough when you are simply left to your own devices.  Why on earth would people ask other peoples opinions of what kind of car to buy, where's a good neighborhood to raise a family, or what kind of haircut do you think I should get but not solicit the advice of a mental health specialist to make sure you're not acting like a complete asshole to the people around you?

Just my opinion but I think therapy is helpful.  Therapy keeps you honest.  Especially when you're married.  And have kids.  And parents of your own.  And in-laws.  And friends.  And communicate with the outside world.  And have a pulse.  See what I mean?

So, yes.  I've been to therapy.  Many, many times.  Individual, couples, group -- you name it -- I've tried it.  Why the hell not?  I've got nothing to lose.  Here's my thinking.  If it was just little 'ol me against the world and I was literally responsible for only myself and nobody else then I guess I could imagine going through the world without any constructive criticism from a therapist on how to deal with all the crap life throws at you.  But combining lives with someone else?  Potentially cohabiting for 50+ years with the same person?  Throw kids, relatives, and finances into the mix and you best get yourself to a therapist and make sure you're doing a little self-check every once in a while, no?

Problem is -- good therapists are hard to come by.  Crappy therapists can really ruin the whole purpose of even deciding to give it a go in the first place.  Therapy is like going to the gym.  If you're not committed, your not going to see progress.  And if after you've already dragged your sorry ass out of the house to go to the gym and the spinning instructor is awful or the tv/earplugs on your treadmill are malfunctioning -- you tend to just throw the towel in (no pun intended).  My husband and I had a GREAT therapist.  How did you get your husband to go to therapy you ask?  More on that later.  But right now the operative word is HAD.  Earlier this year, our "therapist," who is now probably more like the holy ghost in our marriage -- or more appropriately, a very dear friend of ours, let us know she'd be moving out of state over the summer.  Huge bummer.  Please God, don't let anything drastic happen...we're therapist-less and are currently flying this plane without some necessary landing gear.

Thankfully my husband doesn't read this blog -- so, I'm going to go out on a limb and "out" us as having had couples counseling (INSERT collective gasp -- you don't say!  Who knew?  They seemed so normal....) But yes, as frightening as that might be some of your non-believers -- we've been to therapy.  It is true that with much persuasion and after almost a decade together, I finally talked my poor, innocent, and unscathed husband into going to couples counseling with me back in 2009.  Not an easy task to talk a stubborn, self-assured, Irish Catholic into going to therapy.  Come to think of it, I could probably make a lot of money if I put together a "how-to" manual on exactly how to talk a stubborn Irish Catholic male into couples counseling -- I'm going to venture to guess there's probably a good market out there for something like that -- just sayin'.

We all marry each other for different reasons but one of the reasons my husband and I are married is because we are so unbelievably different from one another.  And getting him to consider couples counseling with me back in the day would be an example of this.  I had been going to individual therapy for years when he met me and I continued to go for a bazillion years more after we met.  He says he's always appreciated the fact that I'm the type of person who is willing to work on myself.   That he's really proud of me for always trying to figure out why I am the way I am and am totally open to trying to fix some of my less-than-fabulous qualities.  But when I asked him if he thought maybe he could benefit from seeing a therapist - I think he in all honesty wanted to eat the words he had just spoken.  It was fine for me to do it.  But him?  He doesn't need therapy!  Can't he just appreciate me "working on myself" from a safe, very far away distance that didn't involve him?  Fair enough.  I didn't expect to rewrite thousands of years of Irish Catholic cultural history and assume this was going to be a simple task.  This would take a little convincing.

Especially since there was nothing necessarily "wrong" in our marriage or our lives.  If anything, we were actually thinking of starting a family and therefore things were actually a lot "right."  But starting a family is a huge deal, we're both smart people, we could pretend we knew what we were getting ourselves into, and just hope that our track record together the last eight years together would be sufficient enough experience to delve into this next phase of our lives.  Right.  Because collectively over the past eight years together we had made and raised exactly zero babies together.  Yup.  Therapy will teach you things like this -- that if you think you know how to get through something that you've never been through before -- you might want to call bullshit on yourself.  At least just a little bit.  And then maybe work on yourself a little bit BEFORE you go and make a major change like this in your life.  Preventative medicine vs. waiting to go straight to the Emergency Room -- ya dig?

If my husband and I were really going to be honest with each other we'd admit that we could probably use a little guidance through this next phase in our lives together.  So he agreed.  Now, to be fair -- his beer of choice is Bud Light -- much like his practice of Therapy Light -- a scaled down version of the committed therapy-goer that I am :)  Regardless, he's gone to therapy with me.  Many times.  And I will always be super proud of him for being willing to do something a little uncomfortable for the betterment of our marriage and potentially our family.  Very not so stubborn-Irishman of him.  Major points with the wife.

At twenty weeks into our first pregnancy, we got our daughter's heart diagnosis.  And at the time -- it didn't look so hot.  She would only ever have half a heart. Very rare.  Very complicated surgery plan.  Not a lot of statistics to even give us a vague idea of how she'd fare.  So, yes.  Having a therapist on board dealing with us as a couple -- wasn't just a lucky turn of events in our marriage -- it became essential.  And man, she did an awesome job with us.  With BOTH of us.

Can you imagine awkwardly starting couples counseling and talking about mundane relationship crap (or as we fondly refer to as relationshit which totally has its place BELIEVE ME) and then walking into your next session and saying, "You know what, Lady Therapist?  He definitely needs to be more sympathetic/empathetic and I really need to work on being less anxious/needy -- but um, we might just have to back burner some of the listening exercises and learning how to make "I" statements for the near future because -- our unborn baby is really sick and we don't know if she's going to live or not or what our future holds anymore."  Yowzer.  Forget or newly forged commitment to attend the first class of Couples Therapy 101 -- let's get right to the final exam, shall we?

Once we were well into the battle for our daughter's life after she was born, and literally in the trenches doing the army crawl together as a married couple hoping we'd come out the other end as a party of three -- and if not, god forbid -- then at LEAST an intact party of two -- we were forced to lean on all kinds of people you might never think you'd need in life.  Doctors, surgeons, nurses, therapists, social workers, priests.  "You there!  You think you can help us survive all this in one piece without knowing the outcome?  Perfect, we don't care what your title is or how awkward it might be to share our feelings with complete strangers -- we'll take all the mental health support staff we can get to just survive this thing that's happening to us."  We needed all of it.  And everyone was an incredible support to us.  But I can't deny the fact that we were incredible for accepting the help and knowing we needed it to get through something like what happened to our daughter.

I even said to our Lady Therapist during our last visit  -- I don't know who had it worse that night when we we came into your office and dropped THAT bomb on you.  I just remember thinking -- "Get your medical books out sister cause we're about to give your PhD a run for its money!"  She was all in.  And sweet baby jesus, were we relieved to have her in our back pocket for the battle that lay ahead.  This woman stood by us through everything before our baby was born, she stood by our daughter's bedside in the cardiac intensive care unit, and stood by us all the way up until our last visit with her this summer -- two and half years later.  She's definitely the cream-of-the-crop when it comes to therapists and I know they are hard to come by -- but that's what makes her divine intervention into our lives right when we needed it most -- all the more amazing.  We did our best to convey this to her when we said goodbye -- she quite literally was one of the legs holding up the table that was our marriage and our family over the past few years.  She gave us the tools we needed as a couple to make sure everything didn't collapse on itself.  She wasn't a relative, a friend, a priest -- she was a therapist.  And she made all the difference in the world.  We will miss her greatly and if I can ever persuade my husband to see anyone else ever again -- that person is going to have some pretty enormous shoes to fill.

Anyone can easily think they're a pretty hot shit and totally in control of themselves and their life -- or at least trick themselves into thinking that.  But then there's reality.  Like when the universe crushes you with its massive fist and reminds you that you aren't in control of anything.  We've all had this happen in one way or another.  And I don't mean to be Debbie Downer, and scare the living crap out of you to the point where you have now opened a new tab in your web browser to find the names of therapists in your area that are covered by your insurance -- but if you are doing that? I can't say it's not a bad idea :)

I wish therapy didn't have the stigma of being a sign of weakness, or an admission to being less than perfect.  I wish it was completely normal for every individual to seek counseling for themselves and almost expected that people who decide to get married do couples counseling and have the humility and self awareness to learn from each other's good and bad qualities.  I think it would be great if people tossed around the names of their therapists like they did dentists or mechanics -- that way, we could weed out the crappy therapists that nobody likes and our chances to find good ones would automatically increase.   Therapy would just be a totally normal part of our general day-to-day living.  "You go to therapy right?  Ya, totally!  What are you kidding?"  That kind of exchange would just be your run-of-the-mill mental health banter at your average cocktail party.

We all better hope this happens before my kids are finally school age and I go back to work -- otherwise I'll have to advocate for some national law that mandates everyone go to therapy.  

You know I'll do it, if I have to.