I decided today that I wanted to write about my journey to the point I am at today. It all started Aug 12, 2008. I had just moved into a house with my new fiance Aug 1. It didn't take me long to realize my future husband was not feeling well. He seemed to be sick and complaining he had the "flu" every other week. I started noticing he was having problems breathing and was retaining water in his legs. I have been an EMT for many years and knew that these were signs of congestive heart failure and I mention it to him, telling him he needed to get checked out. but not really pushing the issue because he was only 44 years old. Then on Aug 12 he was really sick and he finally took my advise and went to the emergency room. When we arrived at the emergency room he signed in and took a seat. The triage nurse came out and took him into do his vitals, when she took his blood pressure it was 240/150, she said,"that can't be right" and immediatly turned the screen away from us and took his blood pressure again. This reading got him a bed immediatly. I knew my husband was very ill by the amout of activity around his bed in the emergency room, it was not long before I found out my suspicious had been right, my husbands was in congestive heart failure and his kidneys were failing. I tried to be strong as the news was delivered, but I kept thinking to myself why him? He was by far the sweetest, most loving giving person I had ever met and we were just starting out life together after not seeing each other for almost 25 years. That week he spent in the hospital was a wirl wind of instructions, new medications and a whole new way of life for us. My husband was in stage 4 ESRD (end stage renal diease) and he was now bidding his time till he would have to start dialysis. His kidneys were only functioning at 16%. We decided to move our wedding up, not know what our future held. We choose to get married on Oct 4, 2008 but we were keeping our wedding plans quiet, we only told very few friends and some family, bad move on my part being that I work for a police department as a dispatcher and someone called out that day, they could not fill the shift, which made them order me in, thus ruining our quiet wedding plans. By this time Chris was getting sicker and sicker, he was always vomiting, weak, swollen and he sturggled to just get out of bed every day to go to work. I struggled with my emotions, anger on why they were waiting so long to start him on dialysis, and fear that he may have to start. I started to read everyting I could find on dialysis, and this scared the hell out of me. I read how a lot of dialysis paients died there first year, and I feared that would be Chris. I mean at this point he was so weak and sick that I worried he wouldnt make it though the night. I started reading about the diffrent dialysis treatments that were out there, in center dialysis scared me. I read so many horror stories about how washed out and sick people felt after treatment, and how it was so hard on the paient putting stress on there heart. I had done a lot of research on NxStage and felt this was the safest and easiest treatment out there.
We set a new date for our wedding Jan 24, 2009, this time we let everyone know and even made plans to have a small reception at the Hardyston Fire House after the service. Again plans were changed because my sister passed away unexpectly (she was 46) and her services were the week before our wedding. I decided there was no way I wad going to cancel the wedding because that just proved to me that life is to short to wait. But we did decide that a reception was not a good idea, because honestly no one really felt like celebrating so we opted to just invite every one back to our house for cake and coffee.
