Hi Deb, Glad you are posting. And sad to hear that your HE has been acting up again.
My partner, Mike, had a lot of HE symptoms before his transplant. And lately it has begun to worry me that he may be going in that direction AFTER transplant a bit also. His HEP C is acting up already.
You say there is a new gentleness in your relationship with your husband. Well, lucky you.
Mike was Mr. Grumpy and it was hard to be on the spouse side of his HE. I wish he could have been introspective as you are being, trying to understand what the HE episode must be like for your husband too. Ziffle posted a while ago also about
his wife and what she must have been through.
For me it seemed like the HE was a demon that had taken my honey away to strange land. He was not himself much of the time...as if he had no sense of himself as a player in a family...it was only about
him him him, all the time. That sounds a little odd...but if he made me cry because he had been shouting at me over something silly, he'd be mad I was crying. Not sorry. Ever. And he has no memory of the episodes. While I was still licking old wounds, he was on to something else.
Say we were invited to a picnic and we went. And he was hungry. He would make a fuss about
his meal when the hostess had another plan entirely, and he'd fume and carry on until someone got him a hot dog...right away.
My friends wanted to have "an intervention" but then I explained that it was the HE, that he wouldn't remember acting this way. That he didn't mean it.
During the worst times he was feeble and needed a lot of physical care. When he was okay physically, he would do odd things...shop for stuff we didn't need or couldn't afford, for example, on the Internet.
What I am noticing now is his grumpy gus days. He isn't feeling well again, but I wish he didn't need to shout and be grumpy about
everything. This morning he pursued me into the john to scream at me about
a camera...I was evidently not using it right. I had to tell him 4 times, I needed some privacy, and we could talk about
the camera CALMLY later. That never happened.
I need to be alert
for small changes. The medicines are an important example. He started messing up with the meds, so I started setting them out and ordering them for refill. After transplant we did it together and eventually he could do it himself. But I need to watch again to make sure all is well. You don't mess with antirejection med!!!!
So...be gentle with each other...this is a tough disease.
Hugs,
Carol
Post Edited By Moderator (hep93) : 9/20/2012 2:11:32 PM (GMT-6)