On Time Travel

What a week it has been...went in like a lamb, went out like a lion.  Not work-wise, I'm thankful to say, but health-wise, both for Mr. Squire and for me.  It has been a bit of a challenge, one that has given me many reasons to reflect and be thankful for the fact that in general, both of us are in good health--and neither of us fight any chronic or long-term illness.

For several weeks now, Mr. Squire has been experiencing fevers on and off.  We don't know what that's about, and will be getting a blood test for him after he recovers.  On Sunday, things took a turn for the worse, and he suffered through it Monday through Wednesday, but then Wednesday night he started hacking up all this crap (I've seriously never seen a splat of phlegm so yellow) and he was absolutely burning.  It was clear he couldn't go to school, and when I left to go on a pre-work walk with my judge, he went to the walk-in clinic.

As I was heading to the subway after the walk, I happened to check my email and saw a message from Mr. Squire...it was actually a prayer to God, on which I was cc'd.  (He does his reflections on email, but usually doesn't send.)  He talked about how he went to the walk-in clinic, but they couldn't help him because the last doctor who did walk-ins had just left the clinic altogether.  Then he talked about how he felt God compelling him to walk down another street, where he happened to spot another clinic (that specializes in cardiology and internal medicine) and one thing led to another and he landed in front of a secretary who had pity on him and promised to squeeze him in that day.  Then he mentioned that he could barely walk and that his mind wasn't really clear.   

I didn't know what to do:  I knew I should go to work, but I also knew that I should stay home.  There was nothing pressing for me to do at work (the past ten workdays have been light -- billing 4-8 hours each day)...but...what if a partner walked by my office and saw that I was gone?  What if someone called me and I wasn't able to pick up right away?  Then again... what if Mr. Squire couldn't make it to the doctor's office on his own and passed out on the way?  What if he passed out at home and no one was there to notice it?  This was a real problem, and I called my secretary for advice, and ultimately I decided to head back home.

I'm so glad I did.  I was able to tend to Mr. Squire, make sure he was downing fluids (which was really hard for him because his throat is bright red and totally infected), and sit with him at the clinic as we waited for 3 hours to see the doctor.  It was good to be by his side, and I was able to do a bit of work while he was napping at home, and attempted to do some on my iPhone in the clinic.  Altogether, it worked out just fine.  It was a foretaste of things to come, I'm sure, though.  I question whether many other people at my firm would have made the same choice in terms of staying at home to tend to a sick spouse (granted, I wouldn't stay home if he were just sick with a cold, but he was in bad, bad shape).  And ultimately I think this will become an issue if/when God gives us children...and the same decision will pose itself, writ large.  I'm praying about that.

So Mr. Squire took Thursday and Friday off.  Friday was a good day at work for me, until around 3 or 4pm, when all of a sudden I realized that it was getting harder and harder to sit, and when I leaned this way or that, I felt a sharp pain in my back.  By the time I left the office at 6pm, my pulled back muscle had almost fully debilitated me.  It hurt to sit, it hurt to stand, it hurt to look down, it hurt to laugh, it hurt to talk, it hurt to lift or stretch out my arms, or lift anything.  It hurt to walk, depending on the incline of the road.  Yikes!  

And when I got home... well, Mr. Squire and I kept laughing.  Because...between his weakened state and my inability to move, we made a very funny-looking and funny-sounding pair.  We both moved with the speed of our ninety-year-old grandparents, and he kept commenting on the pain in his throat and his nausea and dizziness, and I kept yelping with pain with every move.  What a sight!  We had discovered time travel, and had advanced sixty years in the span of a single day.  It was quite amazing.  

We went to bed at 8:30.  It took a while to get there, because Mr. Squire had to help me somehow move from a standing position to a prone position, which involved painstaking support on his part and just a lot of pain on mine.  He was still fighting dizziness at that time, plus his fever started burning again.  At one point, as we lay there, he reached over and took my hand and said, "Honey, when we said we would support one another in sickness and in health, did you ever envision this?"  No, I hadn't... but there was no one else I'd rather be sick with!  I was suddenly thirsty, and reached for my jar of water that I keep on the bookshelf by our bed...but I couldn't reach it without pain, and looked kind of like a T-Rex with stubby arms, attempting to reach for it.  Mr. Squire started laughing at the absurdity of it all, as did I.

But this will pass... and I think of the friends I know who are dealing with long-term illnesses.  For them, some version of this is their everyday.  It's all they know by now, and it's a very, very different reality.  We have been blessed with good health, and we shall recover from this.  And I am thankful for this bit of time travel...this foray into the future that not only confirms again that God gave me the right partner in life (of course He did), but also reminds me of how blessed we are to know this is temporary.