Becoming Mrs. Tisdall

Alby proposed on Valentine’s Day, 2023. In my Valentine, he wrote, “How about we go buy you a big ring?” I was so confused; I didn’t think he wanted to get married again. I waited a few days before I even clarified—You want to get me a big diamond at a jewelry store?  

YES, he nodded his head—Yes!  

You know the big diamonds at the store are usually Engagement Rings.

Again, he is smiling and nodding, YES, YES!  

I can be so dumb sometimes, but I eagerly started looking at all the possibilities until I found a simple solitaire with a nesting band that I loved, and then we went shopping. He put the ring on my finger on his birthday in March. For his birthday weekend, I took him to St. Simons. We took another trip to Lake Hartwell the first weekend of June.

That was when I realized he was sick.

That’s when I started getting afraid. He couldn’t handle hiking anymore because of his lung capacity. Then came a couple of days with chills and fever.

We sat down and wrote out a symptom diary and a list of doctor visits. He had his 5-year follow-up with his oncologist in March, and his bloodwork was clean.

I started going with him to the doctor because I didn’t want him to be macho and say, "I’m fine." Since breathing was a problem, we went to the pulmonologist. He didn’t even take a chest X-ray but prescribed an antibiotic. The drug made Al worse. He remembered he’d had it once before and had a bad reaction, but since it was written as a known side effect, he didn’t think he should call it an allergy. His legs were so swollen, and his breathing was worse.

We went back to a different pulmonologist. I didn’t want to see the one who had prescribed that. Dr. Google had said it wasn’t good for people over 60, so I was busy being pissed that it had been prescribed.  

I was manic at home, buying a new air purifier to run at both ends of the house, and I bought a new stick vacuum so I could use it more comfortably and more often to cut down on dust. I even bought a gas grill after he got a lungful of smoke when grilling a Tomahawk steak I’d got him for Father's Day. I whispered to Le that I felt like if I just kept buying shit for him, it could somehow make him better.  

The new doctor sent Alby for an ultrasound on his legs, and to the cardiologist for a stress test. The cardiologist sent him for an echocardiogram. All three tests came back normal.

I took him to the echo on July 27, and he couldn’t walk. I had to go in and get a wheelchair for him. Afterward, I told him he needed to be at the ER because I could see he was dehydrated. He didn’t want to go, so we compromised with a stop at Urgent Care. They reluctantly gave him an IV since he didn’t want to go to the ER, but they also gave him a different antibiotic and said if symptoms worsen, he has to go to the emergency room.

I took off the next day to stay with him. Early in the evening, I was in the basement doing laundry when Nana ran downstairs with urgency. I swear she was telling me to come now; Daddy needed me. I ran up the stairs to see that Alby had tried to use the office chair to roll himself down the hall to the bathroom and still ran out of energy in the middle of the hall. After helping with the urgent need, I laid it out to him. “You have 2 choices: I can take you to the Emergency Room, or I can call 911, because one of those 2 things is going to happen.” He opted for the ER, and I called his son asking if he could meet us there and have a wheelchair outside waiting, as he couldn’t walk.

He was admitted to the hospital on July 28. His skin was yellow, and his hemoglobin was 3, maybe 4. We consulted his oncology doctor, who then ordered the bone marrow test. When he was released from the ICU, he was transferred to Cardiology because the echo he had in the hospital already showed a 20% loss from the normal test he had just a couple of days earlier, and he was in and out of AFIB. After the bone marrow results, the oncologist explained that the chemo he had 5 years earlier had destroyed his bone marrow. He said it was like a time bomb going off in his body. Our choices were extremely limited. He recommended palliative care. This is the doctor who had saved his life 5 years earlier when he diagnosed non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and he was now saying Alby was not a candidate for chemo. We could get multiple transfusions weekly, but that was a short-term Band-Aid. We had to come to the hospital to get them, and it was only a matter of time before the threshold for antibodies got too high for his body to use. They would start fighting and rejecting themselves. We would end up living in the hospital for weeks at a time. This is why his strongest recommendation was for palliative care.

When Alby was in the hospital, my friends asked me what I needed. I jotted down this note, which I recently found still in that draft folder.

Off the top of my head...

To be able to crawl in bed with my husband
To get more than 3 hours of sleep
To be home where I have clothes, laundry, and water easily accessible
To get more miles per gallon, as I’m always hurrying to get back to the hospital; finding a gas station and time to stop is challenging
To have a little Nana time
To have wisdom, as I don’t know how we are going to manage when we get home without the monitors and Al’s lack of strength.

I don’t remember how Nana was fed the first few days, but I know she was. Preston picked her up to take her home with him, maybe the 3rd or 4th day. I know I did some driving back and forth, but I never wanted to leave Alby alone, and the first few days, he was barely holding on, getting multiple blood transfusions and platelets. Those first few days were terrifying, especially when he grabbed a nurse’s arm and cried, “I can’t breathe, please don’t let me die.”

Logistics were complicated. I hated every minute away from him, which made stopping for gas in the car difficult.

Basically, I needed the ordinary, which had somehow become the luxury. The staff kept the bed sensors turned on because Alby was a fall risk, so we could hold hands, but we couldn’t snuggle.

After a week, Le took all my laundry home, washed it, and brought it back. I also bought a lightweight hoodie in the gift shop because it was always cold in the hospital.

When we got a terminal diagnosis, my friends encouraged us to get married now. We had chosen our June 8, 2024 wedding date, mailed our Save the Dates, paid deposits for the venue and wedding cake, and already purchased my gown.  

I told them it wasn’t possible. Al couldn’t get to the Justice of the Peace, and I had no idea how we could accomplish that. They did the research and came back to me with the idea of a Zoom wedding in the hospital, something that came about because of COVID.

After sleepless nights and nightmares, Alby had a good, stable night where we were able to hold hands and talk to each other coherently about what we wanted and how we wanted to move forward. The only givens at that point were that the diagnosis was terminal, and I was committed to staying by his side. We discussed the Zoom wedding that Beth and Lynette suggested and decided, yes, this is what we wanted. It would protect my job, let me be on FMLA, and keep me by Alby’s side.

We got married on Aug. 3 in the hospital. Our nurse was so happy to help him get dressed and prepared for the big day. The hospital staff really wanted to be in the room witnessing the wedding, but we asked for it to be private. I found out later that, in the cardiology ward, they don’t always get happy stories, which is why they were elated to help us prepare. They gave us a Ginger Ale for the toast, and instead of cake, we shared a Chicken Salad Chick cookie leftover from lunch Kelly had brought up. Alby came home on hospice on Aug. 5 or 6. I don’t remember.

I do know that our first night at home, he had a horrible nightmare where he was talking in his sleep. In the nightmare, he was a soldier surrounded by dead bodies and unable to carry them off. That’s when I held him so tight and didn’t know which way to pray because I wanted him to have peace and not pain. So I held him tight, letting him know that I was there with him, and I wasn’t going anywhere. If the light came for him, I could walk him to the door.

My Alby wasn’t going anywhere until he finished his earthly business, which he did with vision and purpose. I made phone calls to cancel all of our wedding vendors. On our 1-month anniversary, our friends sent us champagne and the Wedding Cake we had already picked out and then canceled. We got to have our proper wedding toast and cake.

Hospice nurses came twice a week, and although they sent a care aide to do his bath, he hated that and preferred that I handle it, which I did until we moved him into a hospital bed. The nurses told us they don’t often get to care for patients who are so much in love and take such good care of each other. That made me sad for the world.

Even though we had the love side down pat, this didn’t remove the difficulties of hospice. I couldn’t leave the house unless someone were there to be with him.

One night when his son and family were there, I went to have my nails taken off. I sat in that chair and cried the entire time. The poor girl who was taking them off just threw her arms around me and hugged me at one point.

Another day, his friend told me he could give me an hour to run errands, and I raced the clock to get to multiple post offices, banks, and the grocery store.

When I couldn’t move him quickly enough from the shower to the toilet, I used DoorDash to bring Imodium, Clorox wipes, and coffee to the door. He noticed what I did and, another morning, asked me to please order coffee for myself because he wanted to buy me coffee that morning.

And in the course of trying to live an ordinary life in anything but normal circumstances, I briefly got mad at him one day and yelled at him. I called my friend in tears to tell her that I yelled at my dying husband. She told me I gave him the gift of being treated like a man, not like a dying man.

One thing hospice gave us was the chance to leave nothing unsaid. We did really well in that regard. We could always talk about anything and everything. Sometimes we cried together; sometimes we laughed together, as dark humor always helped us face ugly truths; other times, I just sang to him. And in our conversations, he always asked, "Are you getting this down? This has got to be the greatest love story of all times. Promise me you will write it. Promise me you will tell everyone our story.”

While this is the prequel to the Honeymooning on Hospice story, there will be more stories about our adventures, because we packed a full life into our short time together.