One of
the reasons I have not been blogging is the enormous destructive cost to my
marriage brought on by this disease and consequent need for care taking.
My
personal Care Taking Line of Demarcation of the truly Do Not Go There with
someone with whom you still want to have sex has been and continues to be:
Wiping the Other’s Bum.
We are not there. Nowhere even near there!
Doing 80% of domestic tasks, occasionally helping me on or off with a tight
shirt, washing my hair very rarely, pushing me in my wheel chair when I’m too
tired or symptomatic to walk, offering me a straw with my glass of wine… The real
problem is more about loss of ability and/or interest in going out often and late,
dancing; my lack of comfort in my own skin and its consequent preference for
tenderness over passion: it is the radical change in our way of life. It is the frequent (polite and appreciative requests)
for small assistances and the unfounded suspicion that sometimes I fake inability in order to control his
freedom. Yes those are issues.
But in
the spirit of optimism or
else, I will begin this series on Care Taking with an excerpt from a
BBC article about a woman suffering from her sixth Clostridium difficile infection in
six years and what she decided to do about it.
In April 2012, Catherine Duff was ready to try anything. She
was wasting away with crippling abdominal pains, nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea
so severe she was confined to the house…
…none of them (her medical
Specialists) had performed a faecal transplant and none was willing to try.
When Duff said that she intended to administer the treatment herself with her
husband's faeces, the gastroenterologist agreed to send a sample away to be
screened for disease.
After they received the
all-clear to use the stool, it was Duff's husband John that donned plastic
gloves and assiduously followed the instructions they found online. He was no
doctor, but as a retired submarine commander Duff considered him equal to the
task.
"He was in the habit of
spending months at a time in a metal tube with over 100 men," Duff says.
"As a result, nothing grosses him out. So he was the one that made the
donation, and then mixed it in a blender with saline, and then he gave it to me
in an enema.
"My husband kissed me
after I lay down and told me not to worry, that everything was going to be OK,
and that it was going to work."
Then he
threw away the blender.
Duff lay on her back with her
legs in the air, trying to hold the foreign material in her body. She lasted
four hours before needing to go to the toilet. They started the process at
16:00 in the afternoon. By 22:00 that night she felt almost completely better.
"And I had been literally dying the day before," she says. "I
was going into renal failure - I was dying."
--- The brave new world of DIY faecal
transplant
We are not there yet either. So why is it so difficult?
