Remembering Days Past-- Friday before Martin Luther King Day

I am going to follow the lead of my friend Vicky Stankus as my family enters a time of many anniversaries for significant events and share them with you as they come.

This one is the Friday preceding Martin Luther King Day of 2008. As the day began I had no idea what a big event was about to unfold. My family was exhausted from the previous years of seizures-- seizures had stolen our lives, but that will be another soon to come remembering days gone by. It had been five years of seizures.

My mother-in-law and father-in-law had come into town to help us. I was working 2 jobs and my hours totalled 95 hours a week betweent the 2. So I needed much help. Vic had a test called WADA that day and I did not have time left to take off at work to take him. So my in-laws had come into town to help with the transportation and child care. This was the last of many tests my husband had gone through. It was determined that my husband was a candidate for a brain surgery called surgical epileptic correction and that they wanted to do surgery in February. The test revealed so much to us. Vic had always struggled with learning disabilities and it was believed to be due to the seizures. The test shed so much light on this.

The procedure for the WADA test goes like this. There is some type of instrument inserted up to the brain through the arteries in the groin area. This instrument is used to put the right half of the brain asleep while cognitive function is tested on the left side of the brain. Then the left side is put to sleep in order to test the right side. Tests showed that Vic's right half of his brain had good cognitive function while his left half of the brain had almost no cognitive function.

This changed my perspective a lot. There were areas of frustration with my husband in which I could just not understand and he could not understand either. I was angry with him for not thinking things through well or not considering this thing or that thing. I learned that what I was expecting of my husband involved thinking that utilized both sides of the brain. It was the beginning of being healed. I had thought my husband did not love me or that he just did not care. That was never the case, but we had not been able to work past this until those test results. I all of a sudden understood that my husband was truly loving me to the best of his abilities and the manner in which I was expecting him to show love was not possible for him. I had to lower my expectations. Then I was able to accept love from Vic and it did help in the forgiveness process.

A couple of take away thoughts. When I look back there are so many times when I held things against Vic that I wish I would have given him the benefit of the doubt. We need to make sure we have reasonable expectations of others. It is also a reminder that we rarely have the whole pictures so the conclusions we come to are often inaccurate so we need to keep that in mind as we deal with others in our daily lives.