My wife’s diagnosis of MND has been incredibly difficult on me personally; I can’t deny that I have cried more than a few tears since the day the doctor delivered the life changing news in April of this year. The most difficult times for me are the nights when I am laid in bed with Angela who is fast asleep at my side. While I am laid there gazing at the walls, that’s when the thoughts start to creep into my mind and I start to think about the day when she will no longer be sleeping by my side.
I try not to think about that day, but it’s hard not to because I know that it is coming, that’s when the emotions begin to take over and a tear comes to my eye. It’s the silence of the night that I find the worse, I have many times had to get up and go downstairs to watch television just so I can hear some noise and feel like I am not alone. There is so much that Angela and I wanted to do together and places that we wanted to go visit, now it’s feels like we will never get to do all of those things and it’s a race to pack in as much as we can into the time we have left to be with each other.
Angela said to me of her diagnosis that “I am been punished” I too feel like I am been punished for falling in love, it’s like someone is looking down on me and saying “you will never find everlasting happiness”. I have travelled down the road of depression many years ago, as have many others before me including non-other than Sir Winston Churchill who speaking about depression which he referred to as his Black Dog once said “I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through. I like to stand right back and if possible get a pillar between me and the train. I don’t like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second’s action would end everything. A few drops of desperation.”
Although at times I do still feel the presence of depression I refuse to travel down that road again and I will keep looking at the positive things that have happened in my life so far such as marrying the woman that I fell in love with and whom I adore so much.
MND, The pain behind the laughter 