"So, Where'd You Two Meet?"

I live in a house with six chronic disorders. Three are mine and three are my wife's. When we mention one of them in conversation with someone, there's a tendency to leave out the others. "There's no way we can spring all of these diseases on someone we just met. They'd never believe us anyway." And, yet, it's difficult to fully explore our experience with one of them without touching on the others, especially in an in-depth conversation.

There's an alternate reality where my wife and I met in a chronic illness support group. And that reality isn't so bizarre. Bipolar, multiple sclerosis, Hashimoto, Lynch's, ulcerative colitis, and narcolepsy. These conditions of our lives suggest some relationship origin story that seems more likely than our true genesis. But we actually started dating in high school, before any of these were even remotely familiar to us.

It wasn't until a year into college, and a year before our young marriage, that the first affliction crossed us. In October of 2009, my wife found herself in a mental health crisis that put her in the hospital. We were already engaged and, to be honest, I remember questioning our future together as I sat in a dark intake room with peeling floral wallpaper. At one point, they asked my now wife, Jessi, to return to the waiting room and replaced her with her mother.

"Has she exhibited symptoms like these before?"

"Does she have a drug problem?"

"Does she present a danger to herself or others?"

Those first months are a blur, but I can say that they were scary and uncertain. However, bipolar was the only illness we had on our plate back then, and compared to present day, there was a simplicity to that fact.

For six years, we went to school, got jobs, moved apartments and searched for ever more stable medicinal cocktails for Jessi's bipolar. I began a teaching job in the fall of 2014, and a year in, my body began to betray me.

It started with numbness. The surface of my skin was numb, from my feet to my waist, on my palms, and in spots on my stomach and back. I went to a couple of doctors, but I didn't follow up with any specialists because I was a naive twenty-five-year-old who couldn't be bothered. Then, the fatigue appeared. I was chronically stressed at work, but that didn't seem to explain the flu-like fatigue I felt every morning and evening.

I finally went to a neurologist, and with one brain MRI, it was apparent that I had multiple sclerosis (MS). While waiting for an even more specialized specialist, and any sort of treatment, I started exhibiting painful muscle spasms, severe limb weakness, and a black spot in the vision of my right eye that accompanied pain behind the socket.

Over the next several years, I quit my job to be home with our new baby, began effective treatment, found a new job, Jess was diagnosed with a sudden but manageable case of Hashimoto's thyroiditis, we saw both my mother and my mother-in-law through breast cancer and successful chemo-therapy, we lived through the first year of a pandemic and made it to 2021 mostly in-tact. This is where things really got weird.

In May of that year, Jessi started having spells of fatigue, lightheadedness and muscle weakness. These spells would bring her to bed, where she collapsed and slept, sometimes for hours. Being more proactive than myself, she visited neurologists, rheumatologists, endocrinologists, spine experts, cardiologists and neuro-muscular specialists. And in the mean-time, I began to have severe stomach issues (cramping, pain, and urgency). I got a couple of colonoscopies in the late summer/fall of 2021 and was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. To go along with this, they tested me for a genetic disorder, Lynch's syndrome, that raises your likelihood of developing certain types of cancers (chief among them, colon cancer). I was positive.

But for many months, we still didn't have an answer for Jessi's debilitating spells. She eventually participated in a sleep study that showed her symptoms were consistent with narcolepsy, but these results were discounted by the sleep specialist in charge of the case when he saw that she was on bipolar medication. So, we moved on. Narcolepsy seemed too outlandish, anyway. There was a period of time that we were convinced she had a neuro-muscular disease called myasthenia gravis, but testing eliminated that possibility.

Then, in the spring of 2022, Jessi's psychiatrist, who managed her bipolar medication, prescribed her a wakefulness drug. He'd glanced at the sleep study and figured the sleep specialist had missed something. The results were miraculous. Jessi felt vital and capable again. She followed up with another sleep specialist, and by summer, she was officially diagnosed with narcolepsy. It's strange to be so thankful for a diagnosis like this, but we were thrilled to shed a light on the darkness that shaded our lives for over a year.

So, here we sit, with a story that seems all too fake. Why did all of this happen? What did we do wrong? Was there a virus that ran through our house at some point? Were we exposed to some chemical? Is it a stress response? Is it all just psychosomatic?

With all of these diagnoses, there still seems to be more questions than answers. Though, what I can say is that Jessi and I have grown a lot together. Our relationship is strong and rooted deep in each other’s' unyielding support. That young, frightened man who sat in the intake room at the mental hospital, answering impossible questions about my fiancé’s mental state has grown into a slightly older frightened man sitting in an endless field of uncertainty.

What has changed is my view of our future together. Our love is an absolute, forged in the crucible of chronic illness.