Tuesday, April 14, 2026

In Sickness and In Health

Most young people, blinded by love, accept the usual marriage vows and recite them easily. They promise to love and cherish and even obey, and be faithful and remain loyal in sickness and in health, til death do us part, confident that those issues will never come back to bite them. Well they're wrong, and those vows need a rewrite.

My husband of almost 40 years has had a terrible, loud, hacking, near-constant cough for going on two weeks now and I am fit to be tied, whatever that means. When I said I would stick with him "in sickness" I was imagining something much quieter, like him languishing in bed with me bringing him chicken soup and fluffing up his pillows, not me lying awake on the guest-room-too-hard bed pulling the blankets over my head to drown out the explosive hacking. And that's just at night -- the days aren't much better. 

I know it's worse for him and I'm sad about that, but I'm exhausted. Sleeping is a thing of the past, although Mitch seems to have mastered the art of coughing without waking himself up. Two visits to the doctor and a chest X-ray have netted no results other than it's bronchitis not pneumonia and it will simply have to "run its course." But the doctor never said one word about what I'm supposed to do.

About those marriage vows: Coughing should be mentioned and have a definite time limit.

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In Sickness and In Health

Most young people, blinded by love, accept the usual marriage vows and recite them easily. They promise to love and cherish and even obey, a...