by Carol P. Bartlett

Created on: September 30, 2008   Last Updated: October 01, 2008

When life hits you hard, you get back up and keep on going. Life has thrown me several hard knocks during the past eight years, especially in the last five. I am married, have two children, and one grandchild. I will be hitting the ripe old age of fifty next year. So, this is how my story goes:

In the nineties I got a job working for a cigarette manufacturing company. I was making about 60 k a year. My husband had a job making airplane tires. We were doing pretty good I thought.

In 1996 my son was born, we were renting a house for nine hundred dollars a month, which was a lot for the area in which we lived. I owned a house from a previous marriage and it was up for sale. It didn't sale so we move back into the little house, boy was that a nightmare. My teenage daughter and my son were very cramped.

My father deeded me some land back behind the old home place. We decided to put up a two story modular up on a hill away from the road. I loved it there, it was so peaceful. I worked hard to landscape the yard; i've always taken great pride in having a beautiful yard. Then the unthinkable happened, my husband who is nine years younger than me got sick. At first they thought he might have MS (Multiple Sclerosis). We would be sitting around watching t.v. and his leg would start shaking uncontrollably. He was sent to a neurologist for a complete workup. Let me stop and say the neurologist was a complete jerk. He never looked at you when he talking to you. I think he had a God complex and thought he knew everything. Anyway my husband's condition continued to get worse. I was working, sometimes twelve hours a day, going home to find him having uncontrollable seizures. It seemed like he was hospitalized every other week, this went on for about a year. I honestly thought I would lose my mind. If I hadn't had good relationship with God I would have completely lost my mind, by the way that is when I started taking anti- depressants. His condition worsened, and then he started fainting. He would be walking across the floor and he would just pass out. My husband was a rather large man. I couldn't pick him up, I would call 911 and they would come and take him to the hospital. In the emergency room they would examine him and send him home saying they couldn't find any reason for his attacks. This went on forever, and finally he was in the hospital in the city in which we lived. They were giving him medication for seizures and it wasn't helping. I watched him decline at a rapid pace.

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