YES JENNA, that support from your most intimate of friends, your spouse is absolutely vital. Cleo and I, too, are Best Friends and her tender care and understanding has been both balm and salvation to me through the terror of unrelenting pain. She has seen me thrash on the floor of our bedroom gnashing my teeth attempting to grit through a pain spike pre SCS and even pre surgery of any sort. She has always been alongside praying with me through this. She inspires me along with my other Best Friend,,,,, God.

Although in agonizing pain, any of us can do the simplest of all things that any married or significant couple in relationship may do, and that is the reaching out to touch, whether holding hands, just laying together and murmuring words of love and encouragement, or other things that come possible to our being assure our partner, our best friend of the enduring importance of their closeness, their intimacy, their love is for us. Of course!!! I became incapable of performing as once before because simplest movements for me produced agony, and Cleo saw it if not in my body in those eyes of mine which will betray if I was trying to fake that I was OK.

Ours has most assuredly become a far deeper, more emotional, strongly enduring relationship and we are bonded TIGHTLY together, woven with the threads of a love relationship that is of God. Do I still hurt? ABSOLUTELY!!! Even now, we had to return home from errands because inexplicably my body betrayed me with a spike of pain, and my only solution is to TURN UP THAT SIGNAL and retreat to my bed. This is one of those paralysis inducing crank up of the stim situations, and dear God it hurts, but as I spoke to a store clerk friend a few minutes ago, she was sharing with me how in the community here I am an inspiration to people because they know how I fight NOT to resort to breakthrough meds. I had no idea this was a community observation. I was astounded. Humbled. God showers us with blessings such as those kind words when we need them most.

Each of us has an innate abiding care for those most deeply close to us. If we can manage to share with them, however intimately, our responsive ultimate love for them, they will know, they will observe, they will appreciate.

I am so blessed. I guess I should have written this on the Blessings thread.

Maybe later,
Gonna check out for a while,
Love,
Mark56