Ironing out the kinks in relationship conflicts

I feel like I bring this up all the time on my blog, but hey, this is my life and what is going on. My fiance after his poisoning from work last year is still having a lot of issues. He has acquired new allergies due to the attack on his immune system. He has had hallucinations, paranoia, suspected OCD, lung damage, heart damage, seizures, circulatory problems in his leg, the list goes on. All these symptoms have developed slowly over time, creeping up on us just after we’ve learnt how to manage the previous one.

Sometimes I don’t recognize my ‘new’ partner. Before his new medication, I would regularly tell him that I missed him and wanted the old ‘him’ back. The good news is that the medication did just that. But it’s still almost like sometimes we’re at the beginning of a new relationship, with me getting to know new parts to a new personality. And I know he has felt over all this time, that he doesn’t know himself at times.

When he has a new symptom relating to his brain function and we’re not yet aware of it, is when our relationship is put to the test. It usually begins with him becoming frustrated and irritable, and ends with me not understanding why he’s so cranky, and lashing back as a result. What we’re then left to deal with is a high stress environment. I’m sharing this because I feel as though we are entering into a new phase of our relationship, and I’m amazed at how much it is teaching us.

His latest symptom, which we only pinpointed a day or so ago, has been his new inability to mentally find and choose which words he wants to put into a sentence when he is trying to communicate. As any family would know, this parenting gig is quite busy and high paced already without this thrown into the mix! Sometimes when my partner and I are dealing with the kids and the home during the day, we have quite a few things going on at any given time.

One time recently, my fiance was trying to ask me to do something quickly. I was in the middle of doing something else, the dog was weaving around my legs, then the cat would bolt past, and Missy 2 would start screaming. My man began his sentence, then suddenly stopped talking and just stood there. Being so distracted, I didn’t pick up on his extreme frustration, confusion and nor did I appreciate just how hard he was trying. I yelled, ‘what do you want me to do? What? What? Hurry up and just say it! I’ve got stuff to do you, know!’ And he, frustrated at my rudeness, yelled back, ‘I can’t think of the words, ok?’

We went on to have quite a few of these exchanges which were, as you can imagine, unpleasant and stressful. One night after the kids were all asleep in bed,  his problem with words reared its head again. Along with my nasty, ‘will you just make your point??’  With time to deal with this issue finally, and an awareness that this problem was recurring on a regular basis, we discussed it.

He explained to me that he’s been not remembering his words lately and it’s frustrating for him to communicate things. That he felt stupid and didn’t know why it was happening. I thought this over, and suggested we had a new symptom. He agreed, and that lovely lightbulb switched on for us. He also told me that when I goaded and pressured him about it, that it made it harder, if not impossible at that time to get it out. Think stage fright.

In the past, I’ve heard that if you are listening to someone with a stutter, you shouldn’t finish their sentences for them, because it’s frustrating and not helping them to get through it. I asked him if he’d like me to suggest words, sort of ‘guess’ for him, and he can say yes or no. I also asked him if this would be offensive in the same way that it would be for a stutterer. He believed it would help and wasn’t offensive to him, so agreed to it.

I apologized for the pressure I’d placed on him, and told him I’d try to be more aware that this was a symptom when this situation arises in future. And when I was aware of it, I would help him with the words where and when I could.

We’ve also had some issues with his memory, and sometimes this has been difficult when trying to run a busy household. I have a laundry hamper with three sections for different types of clothes: dark, light, and whites. I have been frustrated at the time I’ve been wasting lately by having to re-sort the colours myself, because my fiance, trying to help, was putting the clothes in the wrong sections, because he’d forgotten how my system had worked. Yesterday, he tried very hard to get them in the right places, asking me several times, ‘how does it go again?’

This has made me realise that I might need to re-think how I do things. I’m going to label the sections on the laundry hamper, which will save me time, because he’ll be able to help and I won’t have to re-do it. I know he loves to make life easier for me, and gets upset if he’s not helping as much when he’s having an off day. It’s the little, everyday things that have been adding stress, things we don’t notice until it’s happened many times. And they take up a lot of time in the average day. Every time he brushes his teeth, he asks me which of the colour coded toothbrushes is his. I’m realising for this memory loss symptom, I might have to label that, too, with his name.  Because I know it’ll work for him, I’ll look for other areas of the house  that might work better for him if they are labelled.

I never thought I’d be grateful for him getting poisoned so dangerously, and technically, I’m not. But if there’s one thing I am grateful for, is that we’ve both learnt more about our relationship, and how to work together to solve our problems, our conflicts. How to come to a solution together. We managed this just fine before his illness, but now it’s been tried and tested back to front, and inside out. Not just from the recent incidents I’ve described here, but there have been so many worse things that happened in the early days, as we were simply just so unprepared for how the damage would manifest itself within his body. We thought the only symptoms he would have would be the ones he left hospital with, and frankly, we were freaked out by those.

The bonus? Some of those symptoms from the early days have lessened and almost disappeared. But one thing I now know for certain, more than I ever knew before this: if we work together, our relationship can survive anything, and that he’s worth it all.

This post may seem out of context with what I usually post in here, but I firmly believe that the parents’ relationship shapes the entire families’. I know each time we iron out the kinks of his symptoms, the kids relax more, and are far more at peace. Thoughts? Not TMI, I hope?