The Winter of our Discontent

These photographs are a diary of my husband's and my journey as I lived in his hospital room to help care for him over the course of a year and a half and continue to be his caregiver at home. His heart was damaged in a nine-hour surgery and less than a month later he was trapped in a dark world of screaming brutal pain and hallucinations. This great storm was brought on by a bacterial infection that curled around his body, hid at times, and disabled his body viciously. When he woke up from the second operation there were tubes everywhere. They seemed to converge in a tangle at his hand. Tape and dried blood held them together. How could these transparent tentacles hold him so surely? Then he looked through them and saw me, smiling. I touched his cheek and the octopus disappeared and left him floating in a green web of reeds in the Sargasso Sea. Our lives were not destroyed but it changed forever how we walk in the world. Concentrating on photography provides a way to protect my sanity through this lengthy ordeal.