Adventures in Education

So, I find myself overwhelmed in my educational career and life in general and I thought perhaps I might cyber bitch about it.

You see, America, I wear many hats. I'm a student, a wife, an employee, a daughter, a feminist, an activist, a cook, a baker and a candlestick maker. Just kidding about the candle sticks, but the rest is true.

Lets start with my most newly acquired status as a wife. I'm the wife of a man with congestive heart failure, and it is a full time job all by itself. I'll tell you, if you ever want to know what the truly fail safe birth control method is, become intimately involved with a chronically ill man. You will find that you have so little time for yourself even with an adult in the house you can't even wrap your head around the idea of changing a small person's diaper.

Yes, I've changed big people's diapers. No, they did not belong to my husband.

But I digress.

So, Bobby (the husband) and I started dating early last year. I've been unlucky my entire life, and so has he, as I'm sure you could imagine a 25 year old with heart failure would be. Earlier this month, we decided to legally combine the giant crap storms that are eachother's lives, until death do we part. He has been in and out of the hospital since last semester, when our apartment burned down ( a story for another blog) and has been deteriorating more rapidly ever since.

I've missed at least 6 days of school this semester to be with him in the hospital. Nothing I do seems to be good enough, you see. He's working with a special cardiology team in the bay area, so I decided we could move there for his care. He can't work, so I started hunting for a job in the neighborhood. He went to the ER for having such low blood pressure they could barely draw blood 2 days before I had my interview. We weren't near his special doctors in the good hospital and he could have died because of it. I wasn't quick enough to get the job and move.

After he got out of the hospital, he seemed to be feeling better. We proceeded with our wedding. Oh, didn't I mention that this happened one week before our wedding? We thought he might be an absentee groom. Anyways, we got married, beautiful ceremony. It was on a baseball field, I wore blue, he wore an 80's tux with sneakers, and his Italian Catholic grandma wore a frown.

We went on our honeymoon and were in wedded bliss, for a few days. Then we went on a whale watching trip and, oddly enough, I got sick! That's new for us. When we returned to the condo (on loan from a friend's boss) we discovered we had been robbed! See, almost missing our wedding because of almost dying wasn't good enough, because it was just almost. Life likes to give me stories to tell where I can say, "this really happened", not almost.

The very next day, we were back in the hospital. What fun! This time we had lights and sirens and a big show of it (and we honeymooned close to his special doctors in the good hospital). Bobby convinced them to wait to admit him until the honeymoon was over, and they did.

I went back to school, he seemed to feel better, again, and life went on for about a week. Then he had his follow up and his kidney's failed. They admitted him and now we are scheduling open heart surgery.

How does this relate to the title? As I said, I've missed at least 6 days of school this semester. My classes are only 2 days per week, that means a total of 3 weeks of school missed. I missed an entire week this last time in the hospital, and the timing of the surgery puts him coming home during finals week.

You see, my faithful readers, all four of you, I don't know what to do? I have pulled 'A's in all my classes, on the work I've done, but I can't get attendance points if I'm not there, and I can't make up in class activities. I am being a crappy student in order to be a mediocre wife. I still haven't been able to secure a place for us to live near his doctors and we will have to spend his recovery at his grandma's house. (The one who wore the frown. More on her soon.)

I promise to try to keep this correspondence to all you random strangers out there light and funny, but today it's just not in me. I'm stretched to thin, like so many of my fellow egg carriers out there, and I'm floundering. I never thought I'd identify myself as a good wife, I'm not big on gender stereotyping, but I at least want to be a good friend. I am supposed to be my husband's best friend, and I will be leaving him alone as he gets his sternum cracked open and his most important life giving organ artificially manipulated on a large steel table. And if I don't leave him alone, I will be giving up my education, abandoning all that I held dear before I met him, and sacrificing (or at least delaying) a future of higher earning potential that could provide for, you guessed it, the husband.

Post comments if you have any advice, world. I hope that my experiences will be inspiring for the most part, but tonight I just need to get the words out of my head.