Personal Crises During Deployment

by Nikki Larson

Talk about counting your chickens before they’re hatched!  My husband was deployed and I wound up with a minor personal disaster on my hands. 

I got sick, and I don’t mean “sick” as in a bad cold, or the flu.  I mean, I got sick as in an ER doc told me, “Kid, your kidneys are failing, you’re not going home tonight.”  E. Coli can be much worse than simple food poisoning.  On the upside, I haven’t been called a kid in a very long time.

Turns out I didn’t get to come home for a week.  Yowza.  For the record, I never get sick.  I can remember the last time I actually stayed home sick from work and that was back in 1999 because my brother decided to give everyone “The Ick” for Christmas.  I don’t even own a thermometer – so one of my friends, after day #3 of me being out from work, bought me a thermometer on her way home and dropped it off.  I almost refused the thermometer until she told me that if I didn’t stick it in my mouth she was going to go with “Option B.”  Since I didn’t feel like fighting her off, I put it in my mouth.

It read 102.7, which obviously, to everyone but me, is very bad for grown-ups.  So she made me go to the ER, which led to all sorts of fun things like an IV, a catheter, an interesting experience with pain killers, blood draws at four-freaking-a.m., hospital food, and one very upset husband because I didn’t send him a Red Cross message informing him that I was in the hospital until two days post-admission (and that was coerced by my mother and various friends while I was under the influence of legally acquired drugs). 

We can call it whatever we want, stubbornness, the inability to admit that sometimes we really do need our spouse, partner, or whatever we call them.  But in my case, I’ll just call a spade a spade and just say that I didn’t want to become one of “those” wives.  We all know which one I’m talking about here – the wife who can’t get through a deployment without causing some sort of personal crisis to get her spouse brought back from a deployment either temporarily, or is some cases even permanently.  For the record, I despise those wives because they make all of us look bad.  

So my husband came home for good after 13 months spent in Baghdad.  His command let him go so he could come home and nurse-sit his wife.  I’m not a very good patient, and I’m sure he’d agree with me.  I expected my body to bounce back right away, and it’s not cooperating.  On the upside (for my doctors), he’s a physical therapist, so there are no worries about blood clots or rehab, because I live with a slightly kinder version of a physical fitness fascist dictator.  The man actually wrote on my hospital room board that my nurses needed to walk me three to six times a day.  So much for resting and recovering.

So what did I learn from all this?  It’s okay to let yourself fall once in a while.  Just be sure to have good people there to catch you.