Toothpaste.

[From February 7, 2016: Because sometimes the little things… aren’t.] I know it wasn’t really about toothpaste. Standing there in the middle of Target late on a Sunday evening a couple weeks ago, though, it felt like a personal assault, like the final insult in a string of ridiculous injustices being thrust upon us. And […]

Complete healing.

[From January 19, 2016: Here’s another from some of the earliest days of The Shitshow, when every day felt like a new indignity, a new diagnosis, and a new reality.] When a tornado rips through a small town in the Midwest, leveling a trailer park or maybe an elementary school, invariably there will be someone […]

Love is weird.

[From February 20, 2016: This entry was written on a quick 36-hour “mental health getaway” to Los Angeles, something I used to do a lot in the days before the shit storm. It’s weird to think that I haven’t been back to LA since.] Sometimes I worry that I’ve given you the wrong impression. I […]

Panic.

[From April 6, 2016: If you want to guarantee the ire of a caregiver, lecture them about the importance of “self-care.” That said, most caregivers could probably use the occasional lecture about self-care. I wrote the following at the beginning of my own dalliance with the very notion of self-care. It’s worth noting that several […]

Apologies.

[From August 10, 2016: Reading this entry again now, all these months/years/lifetimes later, makes me realize how much I have dropped the ball on this, how often I have let those “apologies” creep back in to our conversations. I need to do better. I needed this reminder.] The first time she asked the question was […]

In treatment.

[From January 14, 2016: In what would become less-than-affectionately known as The Shitshow, Chelli’s first actual actionable diagnosis, the first Big Bad we could focus all of our collective energy and ire on, was an autoimmune disorder called Sjögren’s syndrome. Those first IGG infusions, a process we would eventually abandon at the beginning of the […]

Hey, remember blogging?

Way back in the summer of 2011, what seems like three lifetimes ago by almost any measure, two different people close to us found themselves dealing with the harsh reality of addiction. It was an experience that Chelli and I knew more than a bit about, having quietly weathered Chel’s own journey (god, I still […]