Healing happens when I ask for help — and accept what is offered

When my friend Dolly stopped in last week, she set containers of soup and salad on the kitchen counter and pulled on a pair of disposable gloves. “I put it on the church prayer chain. I hope that’s all right,” she said. “My pastor says Paul is like Job, because first he lost a child, and then he broke out in boils.” 

She referred to the Old Testament character whose faith was tested by one catastrophe after another. An accurate comparison, as only three months after losing a son, we were dealing with my husband’s scary medical situation.  

I placed the food in the refrigerator for our dinner and showed Dolly everything that needed to be cleaned and sanitized, such as the shower, the medical shears and the small stool where Paul placed his oozing leg while I bandaged it.

She went to work with rags, sprays and chlorine bleach. Technically, I was capable of doing these tasks, but Dolly’s determined scrubbing lifted a burden off my shoulders far larger than the task itself. The humbling exercise of accepting help is the key to surviving hard times, I’ve found.

Our ordeal began the previous Wednesday when my husband woke up with a fever and headache. He caught the flu that’s going around, I decided, and brought him ibuprofen and drinks, hoping he’d recover by Saturday for our planned road trip to California to visit my sister Rebecca and her husband in San Diego. Paul burrowed under the covers and slept most of the day. Thursday wasn’t much better.

On Friday morning, Paul showed me a red, swollen area around his right ankle, a rash on his shin, and a large pink area on his thigh that was hot to the touch.

I knew that infections traveling up the leg should be taken seriously, and we made a mid-afternoon appointment with our doctor. Uneasily, I wondered if it was an emergency, but I was just grateful Paul was willing to go in.

Our doctor diagnosed cellulitis, an infection that occurs when bacteria — usually staphylococcus — on the skin enter through an open wound and cause an infection. Unchecked, it can lead to life-threatening sepsis.

The doctor put Paul on antibiotics. We gave up our road trip.

On Saturday morning, Paul’s leg was much worse, a fiery red spreading around his calf and up toward his knee, covering five times the acreage of the day before. Paul seemed reluctant to act with urgency, but I thought he belonged in an emergency room because of the rapid increase in the infection. Our doctor agreed.

In happier times, I used to call our son Steven, as he had worked as an EMT for years. He would check things over, calm me down and tell us what to do. It was yet another wrenching reminder of how things are different now.

I decided on the emergency room at RiverBend because I was familiar with it, not considering the effect it would have on me to return to the same ER where Paul was taken after a devastating fall five years ago. It was also the same hospital where Steven had come to visit his dad, because he was an ambulance driver at the time and could get around the COVID rules, and where he had gently placed his dad in the ambulance to transport him home.

As phlebotomists took blood, nurses started IV antibiotics and a calm doctor debated about admitting him versus sending him home, I realized I wasn’t coping well.

Eventually, we were cautiously sent home with piles of antibiotics and instructions to come back if things got worse.

Paul’s leg grew textures, colors and life forms we had never seen before, all while expanding in circumference. Sunday night, he developed three of the most aggressive blisters I had ever seen, so ridiculous looking, like some mutant undersea creature, that I had to laugh in spite of the seriousness of his situation.

I bandaged his leg twice a day to contain the drainage, and he saw our doctor every other day. Slowly, he turned a corner toward healing, and so did I.

Grief, I’ve found, crops up in the strangest ways, with physical, mental and emotional symptoms from nausea to confusion to panic. I have learned to face these unsettling reactions by following a list of grudging and humbling little disciplines — admitting the truth about how I’m doing, talking to people, sending requests for prayer, resting a lot, journaling and most of all, accepting help.

In addition to Dolly’s assistance, my daughters and others called me, my neighbor Simone and her family came with food and flowers, and Leah the niece came in with hugs and three prepared meals for us.

Because we couldn’t go to San Diego, my sister Rebecca, a registered nurse, flew to Eugene and took over the bandaging and medical decisions for four days in addition to listening to me over pots of tea.

In the Old Testament story, Job’s wife is mentioned only when, in despair, she tells Job to “curse God and die,” in contrast to her husband, who insists on retaining his faith. In Sunday school lessons, she was always presented as the bitter half of the marriage.

I have a new empathy for her, as she, along with her husband, had lost children, servants and livelihood. I’m sure she spoke out of enormous grief and frustration, and I hope she eventually found a way forward.

Maybe what she needed was not her husband’s friends pontificating cluelessly about the meaning of suffering, but friends of her own to show up to drink tea, listen, make food and sanitize the shower with bleach. Because healing, for me, happens when I ask for help and accept what is offered.