3-11-2019

Shortly after I came down with this cold that’s making me miserable, the husband started something very similar, but of course, he doesn’t have a cold. He is going through a phase of autophagy, clearing out the trash and hopefully getting rid of some Lewy bodies. He thinks it’s not a cold because his nasal drainage is clear. I’m skeptical, as always. Looks like a cold to me. His magnesium therapy is the cure all for everything, if you believe all that he says.

Last night I went back through my emails and wrote down all the papers and research articles he’s sent me over the last five or six weeks – 27 in all, none of which have I read. I intend to read some but I guess I’m reacting somewhat negatively to his obsessive behavior and preoccupation with his sickness. I get overwhelmed. Every conversation with him ends up connected to his health, his therapies, his symptoms. He is emphatic about supposed changes that he experiences, many of which are questionable. It goes beyond his own experience when he decides that everyone will benefit from his therapies by doing the same thing he is doing.

I am toying with the idea of going to Seattle for a short visit, not that I want to travel, but because I want Esther (daughter) to know I care about her. Birthday week is coming up and it’s always hard to spend it alone with no fanfare. I’m not sure I should leave Mom to deal with the husband by herself. She is sensitive to his plight and feels bad that she doesn’t want to listen to all the things he wants to talk about. I’m not sure how to communicate to him how he would have to change in order that she feel comfortable. I tried but now I think he is feeling awkward, that maybe Mom doesn’t like him very much. I wish there were someone he could go live with for a few days while I’m gone.

He needs help all the time. Not for complicated things but for small stuff, like putting spaghetti in a dish and heating it up in the microwave. He gets “fog” and can’t think what to do if the spaghetti noodles are cold and stuck together. It frustrates him.

I was asking him to cut his fingernails recently. When I see them so long that they look like girl fingernails it really repels me, so I get the clippers out, ask him if he will do it, and then wait. I asked him if there was anything about the job that made it hard for him to want to do it regularly. He seemed genuinely happy to tell me that it was hard for him to see what he was doing, and hard for him to press the clippers hard enough to get the job done. I clipped them for him.  I also shaved him last week since he was having a hard time getting all the whiskers and would leave them in weird places, quite visible. Some of these things wouldn’t be so hard if he would keep up with them on a regular basis, but he doesn’t have a habit of doing that.

Yesterday he was very emotional. He wanted me to know that he felt I was in a dangerous position if I were to decide to treat him like Job’s wife had treated Job. I wasn’t too thrilled to hear that comparison. He did go on to explain that he was getting a lot more sympathy for what the woman must have been experiencing and that he could see the temptation for her to lose patience.  The wrap up of this discussion had him sitting on the end of the bed, weeping, and telling me that he felt he had changed and wanted to make amends for the times that he had not been there for his family in the past. He wanted me to know and believe that he had changed. And I do believe his thinking has changed. It’s a start, but behavior is largely determined by habit.

If Dr. Carolyn Dean is correct about the magnesium deficiency that all of us are experiencing, here is the list of maladies I hope to see changing as I ingest more of it.

• The ringing in my ears
• The pain in my thumb joint
• The sinus headaches
• The funny numbness in my feet
• The white patches on my forearms
• The more common hypertensive readings on my BP
• A faster recovery from this cold
• Resolution of knee and hip problems, before the hike, please
• Better sleep

I realize it’s all connected and very complex, but why not put it all down and watch to see what happens? Meanwhile I will do what there is to do – exercise, try to eat well, keep good hours, keep happy and avoid stress. Shoot for the moon.