“Fine,” he answered in a curt tone I’d never heard him use before. 

Scared that my health could ruin my marriage I saw every doctor possible once we got home – general practitioners, a holistic doctor, two gastroenterologists, and a psychologist. After three months I got my answer, IBD. I had also convinced my husband to come along to some of the sessions I had with my psychologist and he even attended a series of sessions on his own. The combination of understanding what was medically wrong with me, how the disease was affecting both of us emotionally, and also learning some new communication techniques from the psychologist set us on a new path together. 

My husband’s sister had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer at about the same age I was when my gut issues first started – she died two years after her diagnosis at the age of 34. And in his subconscious he was scared that I, too, had cancer and that he would lose me. It was the fear he felt at losing me that manifested in his anger and frustration. This realization, along with my actual diagnosis, made us both feel calmer and more in control of the situation.

As I learned how to control my symptoms better, he and I learned how to communicate better. This may sound simple or silly, but really it helped quite a lot. The psychologist also helped us to learn that no situation is every just black and white, there’s a lot of grey space in the world and if you can embrace that grey space life can seem a lot easier. 

Here’s an example: I used to be an all or nothing kind of person. If we planned to go for a hike on Saturday and on that morning my gut was crazy and I couldn’t get out of the bathroom then I’d get angry and frustrated and just tell my husband to go on the hike alone and leave me behind at home. This would put my husband into an uncomfortable position – he didn’t want to leave me, but he did want to get some exercise and fresh air. So, the black and white solution would be: either cancel the whole thing or have my husband go alone. But the grey side solution gave us many more options to choose from: give me an hour or two to see if I could get my gut calmed down then go on a shorter hike together; or, let my husband go on the hike alone – guilt-free – and when he got back home if I was feeling better we could go to the beach and spend some time together outside; or, we could change the day’s plan altogether and do something outside around the house, like garden, so I could stick close to a bathroom while we both got some fresh air and exercise, just in a different way than we had planned. 

Knowing that I had options took a lot of pressure off of me and I now find that nine times out of ten I’m able to participate in the activity or trip or dinner or outing that we had previously planned. Just knowing what we’re dealing with takes a whole lot of pressure off of both of us in a general day-to-day way.