Everybody Needs One

When my husband had a cerebral hemorrhage back in January, I spent a lot of time talking with other women in the waiting room of the Critical Care Unit. We compared notes on the illnesses and injuries that our husbands were dealing with. We discussed past illnesses that had been survived, giving each other hope.

It was a struggle for everyone to stay positive, to avoid a “why me?” fixation. Instead we looked at how much worse things could have been. We gave thanks that our husbands were still alive, that their condition wasn’t worse. In my own case, I was thankful that my husband had not had a car accident while he was driving around with his peripheral vision shutting down. He could easily have wrecked his car and injured someone else. I was also thankful that the hemorrhage hadn’t affected anything else. He could still talk, and walk, and use his hands. I was acutely aware that things could so easily have been so much worse.

We especially struggled to be calm and upbeat during visitation times. We tried not to let our husbands see how worried we were for them. We knew, without the doctors having to tell us, that it was important for the patients to feel hopeful. After each brief visitation we compared notes about how our husbands were reacting. A common thread emerged: that our husbands were overly grateful for our presence at their bedsides, because they felt they did not deserve our love. The common remark from the husbands was, “I know I’m a butthole, how can you love me so?”

When my husband asked me, I had an answer for him:

“Every body needs a butthole. If you didn’t have a butthole, your body would fill up with crap. You may be a butthole, but you’re MY butthole. You keep my LIFE from filling up with crap.”