Within the five stages of grief I am currently at anger, and most likely will be here for some time. How I know is I am usually an angry person. It’s a fact that I don’t know how to show any other emotion. I have surmised it is because I get this feeling that by showing it, in place of sadness or confusion, I don’t look “weak.” I guess that’s the only time I am quintessential male.

I was never taught from my parents that any emotion is unacceptable. On the contrary, my mother fostered the idea that all emotions are welcomed and should be released. My father never gave any inclination that any of my feelings were not valid. So, this concept wherein I refuse to look “weak” is kind of bizarre, all things considered.

Generally, I am just angry about everything. There is no specific topic that draws my ire. It’s anything. Part of me wishes I didn’t feel that way, but the other half doesn’t want it to dissipate. In my aggressive feelings I receive a weird sense of control, while being nowhere near it.

I will say, the one thing that does have me upset, is my husband getting a second opinion. While I was initially on-board (and still am) I have become increasingly concerned that we are wasting our time. Unlike my husband’s family, I do not believe the doctor is incorrect in his ALS diagnosis. I wish it was just a vitamin deficiency, but I have accepted that it isn’t. In doing so, I have picked my pony on where we should go to next, and for me that’s treatment, not in following this foolish path to a fantasy land that is merely a side route to the ultimate destination.

There is no cure for ALS. There are only scientific elixirs that delay the inevitable. The sooner you get on them, the more likely to slow it’s progression. The decent into it brings about paralysis and the inability to breathe and swallow. I am uncertain if speaking is in there (I have stopped researching because I can’t deal with the gravity of his illness) but I imagine it is. Not being able to go to him for advice is going to cut me the most. I go to him for his vast knowledge and because he knows better than anyone how to soothe “the beast.”

The hardest part is I can’t share these feelings. I feel like I am burden to him or making it worse. I don’t want to bog down the time he has with my inability to cope. He’s doing miraculously, or at least pretending better than I. For being a somewhat trained actor, I am a horrible one in real life.

I want the doctor to be wrong, but life is clearly not about giving people what they want. Example, this wouldn’t be happening at all. He could have been like all the other people who’ve had the weight-loss surgery and gone about living his life as normal. Nope… he gets to have his ability to do normal tasks taken from him. (It should be noted that there is no scientific evidence that one lead to the other, it just appears that way from an outsider’s perspective.)

I just hope we’re not wasting time. In the end it can go either way, really. Either he starts the treatments and then we find out it’s just the deficiency, or he waits and the diagnosis is reconfirmed. Whichever it ends up being, the process in getting additional review is agonizingly slow against a disease that isn’t about taking it’s time.