The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

Intimate worlds. My boyfriend has a serious illness. His wounds do not heal, his body does not heal, but it makes me happy: it is wonderful

2021-07-24T02:10:22.531Z


When she told him to meet, he refused. I was afraid of rejection. But when the author got home, he asked her to be his girlfriend. They have been together for more than two years.


Mercedes C. Viloria

07/23/2021 22:00

  • Clarín.com

  • Society

Updated 07/23/2021 10:00 PM

If we got to know each other it was because he is really tireless.

The first time he wrote to me through the dating app we agreed on, I did not reply partly because I was dating someone and partly because I was dealing with the anxiety caused by the unresolved and accumulated deficiencies throughout my life and the loneliness of being an immigrant.

I am Venezuelan and as much as I love Argentina, it will never be my country of origin.

I kept reading

Sometimes you wish you had the magic wand

Society

However, she insisted after a while and managed to get him to answer her when she was alone.

In half an hour of conversation he got my cell phone number and, in two more hours, I asked him out.

And he rejected me with an excuse that I don't even remember, but he promised that a month later we would go out.

Despite the rejection, we continued the talk that reached all the level of intimacy that virtuality allows.

Other times.

Mercedes Viloria in her native Venezuela, when love seemed simple.

I didn't know anything about him and he knew the same about me. After a day I told him about the problems I had with anxiety and depression, I also told him that I had started a treatment with a psychiatrist that would have to last at least a year.

I told him that I felt alone, that no one understood me. And he, in virtuality, held

me back and knew how to accompany me even though we were two strangers.

On the third day he told me the truth about why he had rejected my offer to go out together on the first day. He had an accident in Spain (as an Argentine and illegal immigrant) of which, by that time, twelve years had passed. He fell off a marine ladder, standing, feet straight to the ground. In that accident he broke his fasciae. I did not know what fasciae were and he explained that it was a membrane that covers muscles and tendons and carries nerve tissue throughout the body. Or something like that. From that day on, he could not walk a single step without pain.

Some years later the accident was followed by a diagnosis of sectorized osteoporosis in the feet and legs due to disuse, due to little walking.

The strangest diagnosis in a young man.

Osteoporosis agreed with what doctors believe to be micro-fractures that squeeze a nerve that causes more pain when walking.

Doctors believe because no one assures or knows anything with certainty.

From that moment on, he needs a wheelchair to get around, although he walks at home.

Later, he explains, he also suffered a knee and shoulder dislocation, from which some years also passed and he still has not recovered.

He tells me how difficult it is for him to open up emotionally to someone when he knows that he can hardly leave his house

and lead a normal life.

All this he wrote to me in a WhatsApp message;

I replied at that moment that I wanted to know him the same, that we could be friends.

But it was a lie, I already loved him;

the difficult thing was to digest that reality.

I know it sounds ridiculous to say that I loved him after three days of talking without knowing anything about him and without having seen him once in my life, but we generated a fast and intense bond of infatuation that surpassed any that I have felt in my life.

Finally, after a month, I went to his house to meet him.

That same night he asked me to be his girlfriend and from that moment a little more than two years have passed and we are still together.

I must say that she really is the most charming person I have met in my life, it was not a mistake to follow my instincts that told me that if I did not go I could miss out on living an experience full of love, sweetness and commitment.

Our situation is, to say the least, atypical. During these two years there have been injuries, but no determination. We have been to several doctors who still do not give an answer. The diagnoses so far are fibromyalgia, nervous hyperesthesia, multiple tendiopathies, bone stress fracture, osteoporosis, and muscle fatigue.

All relatively common and from which most usually recover with kinesiologists

and, perhaps, some surgical intervention.

In these two years, so many studies have also been done that it is difficult for me to remember even half, but I will do my best: RSM, CT, RXS plates, several endoscopies, a couple of evoked potentials, a scintigraphy every year, two densitometries in five years, a genetic study, several autoimmune studies, and several soft tissue ultrasounds. Surely I am forgetting some, because the reality is that fourteen years have passed since the first accident and, as I said before, only two since we were together.

No study led to any explanation for why your body doesn't heal, why your wounds don't heal. But we are still here, at home, together. Our love and commitment increases every day, but our life is frozen by the uncertainty of his illness. We do not have an escape, he does not have an escape, because he cannot escape from his own body, and when the body hurts so intensely, he cannot escape from the pain.

His feet hurt, to the point of not being able to stand for more than thirty seconds, and with special insoles, without feeling that they burst.

It hurts to sit down because it is impossible for him to lean on his sitting bones that are inflamed, or have broken, we do not know well.

His pelvic floor is weakened and his back muscles are weak, they can no longer support him upright.

The neck muscles became so weak that they cannot support his head without pain.

He only finds relief while lying in bed, having to change position from time to time so as not to worsen his muscle aches.

He is bedridden.

In our bed.

He gets up to shower, cook, and do the few exercises his aching body allows.

The pain, little by little, has been accompanied by hopelessness. The idea that things will never really change and we will have to adapt to living with pain. Disability does not bother us, neither him nor me. The confinement bothers him and tortures him; But not having answers is even worse.

I must say that nobody taught me how to open and close a wheelchair, much less how to put it in a trunk of a taxi with gas equipment, I learned that over time. I began to see threats in each pothole of the neglected sidewalks so Buenos Aires and scarecrows in each person who walks absorbed in the screen of a cell phone without realizing that a simple trip can seriously injure someone who is in a wheelchair. I understood that the city is not adapted neither for the disabled, nor for those who assist it, because if each building had a functional ramp, I would not have to force myself to enter anywhere.

Doctors recommend palliative care, which they offer you when you are close to death, when everything you could do has been done and you just have to wait for the moment to arrive as calmly as possible. They include pain medicine, psychology, and psychiatry.

Nothing more. No hope, no ray of light, no opportunity to move forward, to change, to improve.

Only the possibility of holding on.

And here we are both, holding on. I understand that in this context of threat and uncertainty we are all locked up and scared, I understand that we all lost freedom and those who had the worst luck lost someone they loved. We still have each other, but he lives little and lives in pain and without hope. I accompany him with love and tenderness, I try to make life pleasant for a while, we do not know how long it will last because we do not know if there is any possibility of recovery.

The conditions have led him to isolate himself, although he remains in contact, as he can, with his friends from primary and secondary school, those he met at his work and in Spain and also with those he did on the long road he has traveled looking for answers and non-solutions. palliative.

He is, without seeking to exalt or exaggerate it, a brilliant, intelligent, friendly, loving and attractive being.

People love him, regardless of age, sexual orientation, or social class;

people just love it, look for it, and at some point find it.

With all the peace that is in him.

Today, his only non-virtual contact and without having to do with the pandemic that is hitting us is me and his closest family.

In the last two years he only saw two friends who fell for his birthday by surprise.

Nobody else.

The rest of his life, including his work, he has lived from virtuality for approximately seven years.

And it's been at least four since the last time he sat in a cafe or restaurant, since he went to a plaza to sit on the grass.

Pain prevents it and no one can do anything to prevent it.

The accidents that followed brought the pain to the back of his neck, passing through his entire body, which was atrophied by the sedentary lifestyle caused by the injuries.

And I decide to accompany him every day, at each new injury, at each new medical shift

, at each study that he is asked to update.

I remember the first time I told a friend that I was falling in love with him and what his situation was.

His words were etched in my mind as if he had tattooed them on my skin: "What are you going to fall in love with with a disabled person?"

Exact words.

I never spoke to him again, but it made clear what I know many people think.

My mother-in-law, on the other hand, thinks I'm a saint.

In my family, nobody says anything, only my father once managed to declare that "he hardly leaves his house."

The rest of my friends do not say much more, although they are witnesses of the radical turn that my life took since we were together.

Nobody says anything, but little by little, the invitations to places went down until they almost disappeared.

Everyone knows that if they invite me, I have to go alone because he can't come with me.

I know that in my situation many would have discarded that bond that my boyfriend and I formed

and would have continued looking for someone else to fall in love with, but I chose to stay, love him and try to bring him some hope. Because I still hope that something in our lives will change, that his health improves, that a doctor will get an answer rather than care so that he does not have such a bad time for the rest of his life. It can be a lot or a little. He is barely thirty-six years old and he lives every day knowing that whatever option he has to live, it will be with excruciating pain, getting worse and worse.

He, for his part, puts so much desire in life that the pain he feels when he moves is almost never evident. Only someone who knows him well, who knows his history and is attentive to his movements, would be able to tell. You have so much desire to live that the pain becomes unbearable for the mind. You don't remember what it feels like to walk without pain, you don't remember the feeling of having a shoe on, nor do you remember the pleasure of taking your shoes off after a very long day. You do not remember what it feels like to ride a bike or a motorcycle. You don't even remember what it's like to sit relaxed without pain. It is as if I have lost half of my memory.

We talk about death more often than I want to admit. He worries about what will happen to his loved ones when the time comes for his departure. I don't even want to think about it, although I know that considering the life he has, death would be a relief for him.

While we wait for the end - me with an inexhaustible faith to find a solution and he with a deep despair, awaiting a miracle or death - we attend palliative care every day, we go to shifts with the kinesiologist, we look for new treatments. My life was totally adapted to his needs: I started working freelance, now I alternate the days at the office with which I know that I have to go somewhere and I take my laptop with me to meet the home office in a nearby cafe or in the reception of an office. I learned to drive so as not to depend on anyone, I became an expert in shouting for permission on the street; I understood that pain is more disabling than any disability. And that sometimes, hope is not the last thing to be lost.


------------

Mercedes C. Viloria

. Venezuelan architect, designer and writer, she has lived in Buenos Aires since 2013. She participates in Luis Mey's writing workshops and is working on his first novels, shares some of his stories on his instagram profile @mer_viloria. She is an avid reader and in her free time she enjoys doing different artistic activities and driving around the city with her boyfriend and their pets. She has an apparel venture and is also a therapeutic companion, masseuse, driver, physiotherapist, hairdresser, kitchen assistant and - above all - unconditional girlfriend.


Source: clarin

All life articles on 2021-07-24

You may like

News/Politics 2024-03-23T06:33:28.066Z

Trends 24h

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.