Patio, Oxygen, and more!

Hello whoever you are!

It seems as good of a time as any for another random blog post describing random aspects of your one random-wheelchair friend's life! There can only be one by the way, if you happen to have another wheelchair friend there's a decent chance I'll have to behead them someday, it's just the way the legend works.

Anyway, the good news is the updates I have today are mostly good news! Also, saying "good news" twice in one sentence wasn't nearly as much fun as I thought it'd be, oh well.

Tess' Health

If you've read my past few blogs or talked much with us in the past 2 years you've likely heard about Tess not feeling well. As a brief recap, last year if Tess even vacuumed the house it would leave her sore for days. We've seen a bunch of doctors and haven't ever really found a specific condition or catalyst.

Tess has been taking the supplements suggested by Dr Herzog (the doctor from the end of my last blog) and we're having good results! The best evidence is how much yard work Tess has been able to do these last few weeks. Last week she unloaded a full trailer of mulch-compost stuff and spread it in the flower garden by herself in like 3 days! Last year at this time doing like a hour of that work would have destroyed her for a week. She was still sore this year mind you, but it sounds close enough to regular amounts of sore to me.

Tess does still have phantom days where it's bad, or her stomach feels very wrong, or her head hurts with no seeming solution. So we're still trying things and continuing a healing journey. We're happy to be in your prayers still :). But overall I'd say she is a lot more functional than before.

Yard Projects

As mentioned above, we've been doing a handful of yard projects. And it's been fun! Which part of me thought was odd. I remember even a few years ago when I'd ask neighbors what they do with their free time, and they'd say stuff like "yard work", and I'd say "no, your free time, what do you do for fun?" and they'd say "I don't really have any of that" and I'd feel sad for them. Well, Tess and I have all sorts of things we do for fun, one of which is play video games together. But it's funny because most of the games we play together are things where we can work on projects and improve our game environment together. Take Stardew Valley for example, a game where you inherit your grandpa's farm, and work to build it up. I think I enjoy games like that because it's fun to work with my wife to improve our circumstances, even digitally, even recognizing it's meaningless improvement. If I could actually go weed with Tess in our actual yard, that would be sweet! I can totally see the appeal! So doing yard work can totally count as what you do "for fun" in my book now. Even when neighbors or family come help do the work I'm useless to do currently, I still get the same sense of satisfaction at my space being improved. So as a side note, thanks neighbors and family that come help with random stuff!

Anyway, our improvements thus far this year can be divided into three main categories. Patio, Edging, and Grow Boxes.

Patio

We had First Mountain Construction pour a path and concrete patio in our yard. So rather than having an awkward L shaped grass yard, we now have a rectangle of grass, and a big concrete patio that's shaded by our house during the evening. We're excited to use it more! Although social is a little harder during quarantime.

I took the week off work when the patio was getting poured. I posted a handful of progress pics on Facebook, but basically we turned this

Into this!

We've learned a lot about doing such a project, and hopefully it's knowledge we won't need for decades since we have no intention of moving basically ever. But we love our patio! And our ramp outside the side door so I can easily go outside!

Grow Boxes

This project I don't have as much to write about since it's just getting started now. But you can see in my patio photo that above the patio is piles of dirt on black stuff, it's the start of our grow boxes! That black stuff is landfill quality weed barrier that you have to cut with wire cutters. It's like the plastic mats in your car, no joke. Our awesome ministering brother made his nice looking grow boxes, and wants to help us make our own! One of the things that excited Tess about owning a home is being able to garden. When we first moved out it was a little too deep into the season. Last Summer Tess extra felt crappy. This Summer we needed to tear out the old boxes to make room for these projects. So hopefully next Summer nothing crazy comes up and Tess will be able to get into it for real!

If you zoom in on the picture you can see a bunch of pipes coming out of the ground, we had sprinkler work done so we can have 7 separate 8-foot long grow boxes with their own watering lines. The piles of dirt are because 5 of the 7 grow boxes will be 2 feet tall, so they are easier to weed. We're keeping 2 of the boxes short so we can plant tall things like corn. We'll probable fill the space between the boxes with sand. it's going to look great when we're done.

Edging

The last project this Summer, edging! The owner of our home before us didn't take particularly good care of the yard, and last year we weren't really able to even keep up with the weeding. At this point, the grass has really grown outside of make-sensical bounds such that it's literally right up against tree trunks or deep under overhanging bushes or growing into flowers or what not. It's a pain to mow, and looks messy. So Tess has pulled the grass back a bunch, put 8 inch tall plastic spacers into the dirt to prevent the grass from spreading even underground, and added a paver edging. It looks so nice! Here's an example of a small area out front before

and after

Tess has finished about a third of the yard. This project also has a sub project of "ok, but if grass isn't there, weeds will just grow in, right?" To which Tess has tackled the research project of finding appropriate low maintenance ground cover plants that she likes the look of that will actually grow in the different areas we're clearing out. She seems to like it.

So, a lot of different yard projects going on, and it's been a lot of work for me personally to sit around and play video games while other people, mostly my wife, make our yard look better. But I think I can handle continuing. Also most of this work has the aim to make stuff easier to maintain in the future, so it's an investment!

Corby's Health

It's important to support your spouse in what they are doing right? So recently decided to support Tess in her health issues by having health issues of my own! Mostly bladder stuff. I tend to get a bad urinary tract infection (UTI) about once a quarter. I specify a "bad UTI" because even more frequently than that I seem to get the types of symptoms that UTIs cause, and I'll take supplements or sleep extra or drink apple cider vinegar or what-have-you and seemingly fight it off for a week or two. But once a quarter or so I seem to get one that we can't knock except with antibiotics. 

We don't like using antibiotics if we can help it because the bacteria builds up a resistance to them, so you have to take stronger antibiotics, which the bacteria also builds up a resistance to, and so on. It starts an arms race of sorts and the bacteria always wins in the end. For most people this isn't a terribly big deal. Because say you can only take antibiotics 100 times in your lifetime before the bacteria becomes immune to our petty medical since and murders you. Most people will have a deep sickness or surgery or some random thing like every 5 years at most, and so you'll take antibiotics around 20 times in your lifetime, and ultimately something else will kill you before bacteria gets a chance. Me however, if I start today with 100 remaining chances, and I take antibiotics 4 times a year, that means I'll die before I hit 60. Tess already has nightmares about me dying and her being a widow, and every time I get sick she gets deeply sad. 

Toward the end of last year I had a UTI which they said is resistant to antibiotics and had to prescribe something harder. If I'm already at such a point, that's extra no good! My urologist still seems to think using an antibiotic every time is no big deal. We've searched for new urologists but of course all the ones that we want to see are out of network for my insurance. Dr Herzog, who helped Tess, suggested we get an Ozone machine, which hasn't made it through FDA approval in America but seems to be having great success outside of the country. We did a few treatments with Dr Herzog and it seems to help, and one doesn't build up a resistance or anything. It's amazingly difficult to purchase a can of oxygen to use with the ozone machine, but we've hopefully overcome all the hurtles, and we're going to try that.

Besides that I'm generally happy and healthy! I'm just more light headed than I'd like to be, but that's been a problem the whole time I've been Gimpman. It'd be another great thing to solve.

Quarantine

Not many people have heard about this, but I guess there's this strain of virus going around called Covid-19, and health guidelines have been generally to social distance. Weird right?

Ok, even living under a rock, I'm sure you've been affected by the pandemic. Because rocks don't wear masks, silly rocks. I know the economy is struggling, and people are dying, and freedoms may be being taken away, and political opinions are getting super inflamed and diving people... But at a personal level, Tess and I kind of love quarantine!

Social

The hardest part has been people obviously. We cancelled most of our caregiver help because we didn't want to be the intersection where 10 different families all infect each other, so we reduced it down to just the 3 guys who help with my bowel care. This means we haven't got to see the other 7 families and connect with them weekly, and it's sad.

Also, we used to average inviting a couple over once a week to play games or have dinner, and we haven't been doing that either. Also sad, because there are so many great people in our lives. Even pre-quarantine I already felt like we basically invite people over once and then never have them over again even though we'd love to, because we're having some other couple over for the first time. So now that we've taken 4 months off without inviting literally anyone over, it feels extra like we don't see friends as often as we'd like.

However, this stuff does have positive sides!
1- Tess and I have a bunch of different things we enjoy doing together. So it hasn't been painful at all to fill our usually social evening with more together time.
2- We've been able to connect with different people better during our strolls, more on that next section.
3- We feel more like a true married couple than we ever have before. Since day one when we got married I had people coming in to get me in/out of bed so Tess didn't have to. This is something we do love, but it does have the slight downside of making our schedule really rigid. By having help, I'm already asking someone else to interrupt their life at 9:30 to come be of service to me. If it's 9:20 and we're 20 minutes from finishing a board game, I generally don't want to call and delay the help, we just finish the remaining 10 minutes the following day. But now that Tess is putting me in bed, we can just stay up and finish! It's a silly thing, but it's really magical. So to an extent we really like it.

Church

I know some people hate Elders Quorum and relief society, or going to church in general. Tess and I are weird I guess because as long as there isn't some particularly painful teacher that week, we generally enjoy church. Two hour church has been great, but I do slightly miss having the EQ connection every week. But church during quarantine has been great! We generally wake up at 9, but stay in bed and snuggle while we listen to conference talks or Come Follow Me videos. Sometime after getting up I'll read the Come Follow Me manual to Tess and we'll discuss (note, we read the chapters generally after dinner during the week). Then Tess will play the piano while I sing a church solo, or we'll do a hymn. Then I'll bless and we'll partake of the sacrament. So the amount of church listening/reading/discussing we do any given Sunday varies from like 60 to 150 minutes, but it's personalized and includes snuggling and is all around great!

We've made a habit of going for a stroll (Tess strides, I roll) every day, usually shortly after dinner. We did these last year too, but this year whenever we see people outside their homes we stop and talk. We make sure to go to different areas in our ward boundaries so we have chances to run into different people, and it's been great! I feel like we are connected better with a bunch of people now than we were when we only saw them at church. Part of that is because at church there's only like 3 minutes between sacrament and the next meeting to say hi. Or even if it's after church people have their kids nagging them to go home. When we visit at the home though, nagging kids can just go play, and there's no time cutoff to chat! We average talking to about 2 different families per walk, and our previously 20-minute walks now take like 60-90 minutes, but it's been a great social supplement.

So yeah we kind of miss church, but having the flexibility of time, and the personalization of the discussions, and the added reason to connect outside of church has been nice. Note we do recognize that most of these good points can continue even when the quarantine is over :D.

Temple

Ever since like a month after we got married Tess and I have served at the Oquirrh Mountain Temple on Saturday afternoons. With the temples closing, it's actually been a little magical for us too, because it meant we have that 6 hours of Saturday time back. It's essentially turned every Saturday into a holiday for us! Since the only time in our married life we've ever had a full day with no work and no church and no obligations has been on random holidays. But now, it's every weekend! We do try to generally do some family history or something productive on Saturdays still, but whatever we do doesn't take nearly as much time, and doesn't mean we can't sleep in :).

We of course miss the temple, I still strongly believe that my life is blessed as result of our service there, and we always feel happier after being there. When given the opportunity to go back we'll happily resume. But have you ever had someone ask for a bunch of your time, but then later they cancel for whatever reason and you're off the hook, and someone says "well, you're still blessed for being willing!". It's like that! I still feel like we're blessed for the time we did spend, and because the Lord knows we'd be there if it's open. But it's like we're double blessed because we also get to have the time back anyway!

Also, we feel like we may be still be experiencing what we call "the temple effect". Last year, when Tess was extra unhealthy, some mornings before the temple she felt awful and wasn't sure she'd be able to go. Or I'd feel light headed for whatever reason and be skeptical I can serve well. We would always go anyway, and invariably we would always feel super healthy at the temple, to the point where sometimes we'd even start making plans for what we were going to do after the temple while feeling this good. But then we'd leave the temple and go back to feeling more or less how we felt that morning. So basically the temple effect is a healing boost we feel while serving in the temple. With us not being there, Tess has really felt like it's still been active for her, and that's why she's been able to keep up getting me in and out of bed so often. We do plan to ask for help again once the pandemic dies down, but we've been blessed to be ok during anyway.

Misc

Quarantine really has been fun for us. We've been able to make a bunch of progress in our yard, we've been able to connect with different people in new ways, and we've had a bunch of fun in general. I guess I never mentioned that I'm of course able to work from home. Vivint's revenue is mostly monthly subscription based, so while we did have our share of layoffs, and work has stayed more intense this Summer than it usually does, (we're trying to recover lost ground), I've been able to keep my job, and I'm grateful for it.

I also was able to refinance my home from a 30-yr 3.75% down to 25-yr 2.875% loan, so my monthly payment shifted like $6/mo, but I took 5 years off of my mortgage and overall I'll have spent $51,000 less on interest.

Tess and I have been keeping track of how many 1v1 board games we've won against each other since the quarantine started. At one point she was up 7-15! But I've caught up and currently it's 28 me 27 her. We always assumed we were pretty evenly matched, since it felt for the most part like we go 50/50ish, and it's fun to have this small sample set proving it.

Tess has made a bunch of progress on her book "My Husband Is Lame" and I'm excited for one day when we actually can share it, but that's probably over a year out.

Also we had the crazy idea to make a board game! I'm sure almost none of you have ever played the board game "Arabian Nights", it's like a "choose your own adventure" book but in board game form. It's not strategic at all and it's more about just making choices and seeing what the outcome is, and it's a lot of fun. We've decided to make a medieval fantasy themed version of the same concept, and it's a fun project! But also I'm sure won't see the light of day for at least a year.

Anyway that was quite a life dump! Thanks for reading!

My wife is lamer than me (Part 2)

Well, a surprising amount of people read the blog about Tessa’s health in September, and many of you ask how it’s going, so I figured I should write an update to give you an upload of the uptilt in the trajectory of this upheaval in our lives. The quick version is we found a new guy who upset Tess with his verbal uppercuts. We’ve since upgraded to a more uplifting doctor who feels she can get us on an upward trend. I’ll give more details though so you don’t get upset and I don’t get upbraided. I’m now out of up words.

So, I even ended the last blog with a mention of “if you know anyone who can put all these results together, let me know…” one of the main issues some of the tests say is generically that her methylation cycle is off, so Tess did some research and found a guy who supposedly specialized in methylation. We went to see him and we brought all our results in hopes he’d be able to put it together. He started off well enough, he basically said “before we look at all of those, can you tell me about the symptoms of what’s going on?” so Tess did, and then when the conversation led to talking about test results so far he said something akin to “yeah you didn’t need to take any of that, you wasted your time” and it rubbed Tess wrong. In general she felt like he came across too condescending and was too focused on his pet topics of what everyone needs (more iron, must sleep in exact time window of the day, etc) and she just didn’t like him. I thought he wasn’t terrible, but he admittedly didn’t seem to be grasping the bigger picture.

We tried his supplement suggestions for a few months, didn’t see any change/improvement, and went back in November after taking an auto-immune test. There was one slight marker and he said he could prescribe a long term pain killer (way to fix it!) I was like “isn’t that a bandaid though? What’s the real fix?” and he said “well, you could try the AIP diet” which basically cuts every food you’ve ever heard anyone being allergic to. He said we could take a food allergen test, but it’d be like $190. Tess started saying no, but I didn’t want to start some crazy diet without knowing if it even needed to be done. She looked uncomfortable about the money being spent, but I’m a big strong man who provides for my wife! So I said we should do it! And we DID!

Break time for a pro-tip. If you want to do something, and your spouse is on the verge of tears, rather than assuming you know why and bulling forward anyway, I highly recommend not doing whatever it is, and talking first. Tess burst into tears on the way out of the office, and the workers were all trying to smother her, which of course isn’t helpful. We talked in the car on the way home and it wasn’t the money (oops) it was more that she’d rather deal with the physical discomfort than with the guilt felt whenever she wanted to eat a food she would now know she’s allergic too. Also she just spent months making a 8 week rotating meal plan that would be totally shot. So me bulling forward with the test was definitely unwise and not very sensitive of me. I'm of the "the more data the better!" opinion. But forcing the same perspective on Tess was not very empathetic or husbandly of me.

Anyway, gratefully when we got the panel back we found she’s allergic to almost literally nothing. She was 0 on like 43 categories and a 1 of 8 on blueberries or something random. Despite that Tess was done with that doctor anyway. Mentioning the idea of scheduling with him again was an easy way to make her instantly stressed.

I encouraged Tess to pick a new doctor before we stopped seeing the current one, because I’m fine not seeing any specific person, but I do want to keep momentum of trying something. So Tess found a MD turned naturopathic doctor that her dentist (who got us started on this path anyway) recommended. This new doctor’s online registration stuff took 2 hours to fill out, and Tess wrote a 7 page essay about her medical history and the journey so far. She also uploaded the blood work and genetic tests and in general everything we’ve done up to this point.

Our first visit we were admittedly pessimistic, we fully expected her to have not read anything, and jump on her first pet topic. But to our surprise she’d read everything! Even the 7 page essay! She then proceeded to take two hours with us and go over all the tests we’d taken so far, and put each meaningful detail into a category of what might be causing it. Ie Stress, toxins, foods, infections. Based on all of it she recommended a few supplement tweaks, and thought that it’s likely a liver problem of some sort. She recommended a bunch more tests to help verify her ideas.

When we came back the second time, she had already printed out the new test results, and written the previous test result values so we could see what changed and by how much and what that means and… anyway the point is she was very comprehensive and seems to really be looking at the picture as a whole rather than just focusing on one detail and diving a mile deep into it. Although she does have her pet topic of going gluten free that she's brought up 3 times now, even though Tess has taken two separate tests that both say she's not sensitive to gluten at all. Despite continuing to mention that she does actually action on the data at hand, so we don't mind her pet topic :D.

We’re now 2+ months out from the last visit, and we’re going to re-measure a bunch of the things the doc tried to supplement, and go see her about the results early April. That being said, it has basically had no positive impact so far. Tess is still generally lethargic, and what would usually be meaningless amounts of physical exertion still take a way bigger toll than they reasonably should. So it’s still a struggle and a search. Tess felt extra crappy some days even and wrote a message to the doctor describing the new discomfort she felt, and the doctor responded telling us this is expected and to hold the course. So that's what we're doing!

However! After reading the last blog it seems like most people thought it meant Tess is just lying in bed aching and crying all day and has no happiness. Note that we still have wonderful fun times together playing board games and watching shows and having people over and so on. Life hasn’t stopped completely. But! We’re happy to be included in your prayers ;).

Thanks for all your support, especially our awesome neighborhood who does SO much for us! I really couldn’t be a home owner without all of you.

Ok bye!

My wife is lamer than me

My wife is arguably more lame than I am. If you’re reading this there’s a decent chance you’ve heard about Tess feeling crappy and us trying to figure out what to do about it. For the last year or so she has ached a lot, slept crappy, and so on. It keeps getting worse too. It’s escalated to the point where she tries to have at least 2 days worth of leftovers before doing simple things like mowing the lawn or vacuuming, since even small amounts of physical exertion are so exhausting and painful that they knock her out for days at a time. She often says she feels like a giant bruise. Which is silly since she is only 26. So! This post has two purposes, #1 giving you all an update where we’re at so we don’t have to explain it all the time. And #2 helping me process everything we’ve learned so far by putting it into words. I’m kinda dense and every time the doctor mentions neuro transmitters my default reaction is to review what I remember from the last superhero movie I saw. Adulting is lam-.. Er, boring?

Anyway! To summarize, we’re still very much gathering data and doing tests, and anything we think we know may get thrown out the window with the next discovery. The simple concept seems to be that when you produce energy your cells create waste. Tessa’s body doesn’t clean up the waste very well, so now she’s full of crap (not to be confused with literal feces). All this waste is stressing out her body and brain, so her body is inflamed and she aches all the time, doesn’t sleep well, and she is in a high stress state all the time. It may even be the root cause of SPD (but don’t hold your breath*). Tess has started some supplements they think might help, but thus far a week of those seems to have had no effect. And that’s where we’re at! Feel free to stop reading here, you have the full update.
*unless you’re about to go underwater while reading this, in which case it’s encouraged.

So Tess as you know is very interesting. She received her bachelors in biomedical engineering, so she of course is all in for medical science being able to help people. However her threshold for when to actually take anything or see anyone about health problems for herself is pretty extreme. So just note the fact she's even willing to see anyone for it means it's a big big deal. She does a good job of hiding it and not being grumpy with me or around others though. Also we of course have been praying about feeling better and finding help for years, and continue to pray about it regularly now too.

The most recent catalyst for our discoveries was a documentary called “Root Cause” which was free on Netflix for a really short period of time. It’s about how doing a root canal is really leaving something dead in your mouth, and you wouldn’t leave a dead finger attached to your hand or it would cause trouble, why do we leave dead teeth in our mouths? They have all sorts of interesting studies about how root canals usually cause all sorts of trouble, but dentists don’t have equipment to see the mistake they made; Usually “cavitations”. Cavitations are gaps under the tooth that fill with infection and don’t hurt directly but rather distribute the infection and mess up other places. The documentary said something that really caught Tess’ ear though when they said that sometimes it causes Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD) symptoms, and that even a badly done wisdom tooth removal can leave cavitations. She thought about it and the start of her SPD (which has become worse over time) coincides with her wisdom teeth removal years ago. 

So, she found a specialty dentist (Total Care Dental in American Fork) who knows about caviations, she went in and they checked her out and found 4 really bad ones, so they moved her to the top of the surgery list and got her in to fix it. We did that and Tess actually got worse. (In hindsight, part of the surgery involved using a gas that would kill off any infection they couldn't reach. This of course produced a lot of waste, which Tess can't get rid of, so it made it worse!) They kept saying “oh it takes three months to feel better” but finally two months in when Tess described the way she felt crappy they said it sounded like some people in the office who have some specific genetic stuff, and they encouraged her to take a DNA test. So Tess took one through Ancestry (using the Mother’s Day discount, nailed it) and discussed it with Doctor Preble, who we think is technically a “Neuromuscular dentist” but any time you mention his name to any of the staff at the office they always say “he is so smart!” Anyway Doctor Preble apparently knows a bunch about genetic stuff too, he told us some stuff about Tess’ genetics but mostly wanted to order out some other tests. There was some shenanigans and delays getting the blood work and saliva tests, but finally we got both back and learned some more. He is definitely a smart guy, but he has a hard time dumbing it down to my level; which is a large part of why I want to write all this down, so I remember better. I even asked him last time “so if you were to explain this to a 12 year old what would you say? And he said “So DNA is the building blocks of who you are, and in them are these nucleopeptides, and they… well Tess has this circle, and due to some of her genetic snips there’s a… a stop in the circle…” this is where I interrupted and in my own words explained more the paragraph this article started with, and he confirmed that’s a decent enough simplification. When a sentence in to his “simple” explanation still used the word “nucleopeptide” I started grinning, and realized simplification isn’t his forte. Note he’s still a fantastic doctor and I highly recommend him though.

In parallel with all this, since Tess has ached and been inflamed she started getting massages two years ago, and the last 6 months or so she was seeing a chiropractor who kept putting her spinal bones back into place when they’d slide out. Recently that guy’s expected fix timeline ran out and Tess switched to chiropractor Gutherie, who also seems to know a good amount about the stuff we’re finding. Some of the recommendations come from him too.

Here’s a piece of one of the tests Tess took, any of the things outlined in red or yellow are bad (well, that is oversimplifying it, but neither of us REALLY know what any of this means either. Even after Tess read science-y articles for 6 hours). But she has at least 6 different genetic mutations within this circle.

She also took some mineral hair analysis thingie and it basically said she was massively deficient in like 13 of 16 categories. So basically her body is missing lots of stuff, probably because the cycle above or others are broken and her body exhausted everything she had left trying to fix it. She’s trying to take a bunch of things that will help jumpstart the broken cycle and to supplement the missing stuff directly where possible. 

And that’s where we’re at! Anything we try doesn’t really have rapid results so don’t feel bad if you ask Tess how she’s feeling and she still says “crappy”. We still snuggle and play board games and video games together and have company over and such though (yes all at the same time. Maybe.) so it hasn’t destroyed our fun. Mostly it makes Tess sad she can’t do all the things she wants to do in the yard, but our neighbors and parents are angels and help with that too. Thanks neighbors and parents! Also, if anyone knows any genetic nutritionist people who could help interpret some of this stuff, please pass on their information. We are mostly guessing at what things are best because we haven't found someone who knows how to combine all the different test results.

New Home!

Well, we have now lived in the new home for a month and a day, and it has been amazing! The home itself has been great, and the neighborhood has been even better.

As a little backstory, we owned the condo that we lived in out in Bluffdale. I purchased it about a year before Tess and I got married. It was 1250 ft.²- three bedrooms two bathrooms. I know a lot of the time when people first get married they end up moving into somewhere very frugal, but since I didn't get married until I was 30 and I’d been working as a software developer for five years, I at least had this nice-ish place. (And that's after wheelchair expenses) I liked to tell Tess I was glad she didn't have to live in a cave :-).

We hadn't really outgrown our condo, since we haven't started having kids yet. (For those who are curious, kids are still at least a few years out). But anytime someone used the big metal stairs to get to their condo it would be noisy, and Tess was often afraid to play the piano because she didn't know if anyone above us might be taking a nap. And I wanted at least a small yard for pets someday. We were starting to feel a little tight too, for example, we stored our Christmas tree at my parent’s because we didn’t have anywhere to put it, and Tess was storing cleaning stuff in the spare bathtub. We were feeling ready for the next step. I’d like to add here that I recognize how blessed/spoiled I am. Even when it was feeling like we were running out of space, that still means all the floors were clear so I could drive around and we didn’t have clutter in any of the main rooms. I know many people have had to live a lot more cramped than I ever have.

So back in November or something my cute mom (who loves house shopping) suggested we start looking at houses even if we weren’t super serious about moving yet, just so we’d know what we like. Tess mostly did the looking, she could basically pull up a picture of the master bathroom and the front door and maybe some hallways and rule out the house just because they wouldn't work with my chair. We did put an offer on a house in Riverton that would have worked -if we had built a ramp in the garage and knocked out part of the master bedroom closet and wall. We bid $5000 over, then they raised the house price up $10000, and then we bid $2000 over THAT offer with no conditions (and even a sappy letter about ourselves) and STILL lost to one of the other someteen bids, the housing market is crazy! Of course now I’m grateful we lost that one :D.

One night Tess was on the home listing website and found a search filter for homes specifically listed as being wheelchair accessible. There were only a few. This one was even slightly out of our preferred price range, but after looking at the pictures she went and saw it while I was at work, then told me I needed to come see it too. When I first rolled into the house through the step-free garage entrance I was like “yeah crap, this is it, we need to move now huh?” The sellers agent's husband saw us leaving and called the owners to say “these are the people who you need to sell the house to.” When I asked the previous owner why they were moving and he said “honestly? I was talking to my agent, and really we all just feel that I was holding this house for you” which is neat, he accepted our full price bid without even giving other people time to offer. He was a quirky fellow and I’ll probably have a story or two about him below, but overall I’m very grateful for him holding the home for us. The home had already been listed for 21 days at the point Tess found it, which is unheard of in the current crazy market. Also, a couple of weeks before finding the house I had gotten a small raise at work. After making a bunch of excel spreadsheets, we found that the raise perfectly covered the difference between our original house budget and the slightly higher price of this house. We are just supposed to be living here haha.

Well, that's probably enough just blabbing, time to give you a tour!

This is our home! It's in South Jordan near Sprouts.

 It sits on a 1/3 acre lot, which honestly was bigger than I was looking for in a first time home, but! The owners 2 years ago landscaped it wonderfully.

 This fence originally had 2 sections taken out so the recent owner could drive his back hoe into the yard (he didn't really take good care of the yard at all). Anyway on move in day our awesome neighbors tried to put the fence back up, but the cement was damaged. So they broke it, dug it out, and re-poured cement to fix our fence. More on this later, but the best thing about this house is actually the ward and neighbors, who are incredibly willing to help. We had so many people show up to help us move that they ran out of stuff to do, so a group of them cleared out most of the overgrown flower beds. I'm tellin' you this place is special.

  This is the view if you jump the fence in the last picture.

 And now moving forward from the last picture so you can see behind the house. In this view you can see the nectarine tree, the grape vines, and Tessa's favorite, the peach tree!

Turning right from the previous picture, we have a fire pit! And a mature cherry tree! And an apple tree! There is even a tree house in the cherry tree. Maybe we will have kids someday who will use it, but for now the back fence neighbor kids spend a lot of time up there. The last guy parked a trailer or something here so a bunch of the grass is dead, but we think we'd like to pave this circle around the fireplace in some way anyway.

 Back to the front, here is a view inside the garage. No step!!

 This is our wonderful kitchen! A lot of the houses Tess looked at had smaller kitchens than even the condo, but this one is awesome :D. Note Tess painted that back wall green to add some personality to the room.

 Here's a view from in the kitchen looking out towards the family room. We painted that brown wall too. The whole house used to be painted a sick brown-green color that neither of us liked.

 This is the hallway to the master bedroom, plenty wide for my wheelchair!

  Master bedroom, with enough space I can get to Tessa's side of the bed for morning snuggles!

 View from Tessa's side into the bathroom.

 The bathroom! This was the other major selling point of the house, the bathroom is huge! We pulled out the bathtub and shower and put in our own roll in shower.

 Our last shower was small enough that Tess had to pull my shower chair out to take her own shower, but this one is big enough that it can stay against the back wall all the time. You can see it peeking out behind the curtain just a little.

 And even after the shower we still have space to add some shelves in that corner still!

 This is our walk in closet off of the bathroom, I can fit inside!

 Down the hall from the master bedroom is this guest room. It's the closest thing to a tight space for me in the house, the entrance is a little zig zag, but I fit.

 GAME ROOM! Plus an exercise bike. I know when I brag about my washboard ribs I usually say "and I don't even work out!" but if cardio counts as working out than I'm lying, oops.

 Second bathroom, by the two other rooms.

 Family room! I can drive around the couch in circles!! Which brings up another thing I love about this home. Our condo was 1250 ft.², and apparently finding a house that same size with a yard is not a thing. Most places we looked at were 2500 ft.² but they all included a 1250 basement that I couldn't really access. While any of those homes would still be an upgrade for storage space and Tess-space, the Corby living space would have stayed the same. However, our new home is 2550 ft.² but 1650 of it is on the ground floor with a small loft area upstairs (no basement), so it's even an improvement for me! I'm so spoiled/blessed :D

 Another angle on the living room, you can see we keep the piano in the coat closet, it was a perfect fit!

 You can see me here looking up at the open space above me, it goes clear to the ceiling and has a big window in it I love. Also, funny story about the carpet in this room- the previous owners had a few pets and must have never vacuumed. On the day we got the keys to the house Tess brought some paint swatches and wanted my super-valuable masculine color opinion. I picked one that matched the corner of the grey carpet I was closest to, but then Tess grabbed my arm and pointed the swatch at a spot of carpet that had been protected by furniture. Turns out the carpet was actually brown. During the week before we moved in Tess, one of her sisters, and my mom vacuumed literally 18 times AND had professional carpet cleaners come, and we were still finding dog hair. We also had someone come clean the kitchen and bathrooms- the kitchen alone took 4 hours because there was dog hair stuck in the stove and oven.

This came out of the vacuum after Tessa's 3rd attempt, and that was after the ward helped vacuum before too. Crazy amounts of dog hair, seriously crazy.

 

Here is the garage door and the laundry room.

 If you go up the stairs you find Tessa's office space craft room. Over the left wall you can see down into the living room. Pictures really don't do the upstairs justice.

If you turn around in the office there's this bench, and this whole projector wall set up I'll probably never use.

 Supply storage room!

 Me down in the living room!

 That window if you look straight over.

Quilting space and thermostat room! One quirk we'll change eventually, the thermostats are both up here. Also I pluralize thermostats because the house has forced air cooling but radiant heat, and apparently it's hard to get a thermostat that can handle both.

 Random window hallway upstairs.

 And finally, a bedroom upstairs if we ever need it.

Random fact: this home was built in '97 in a special style where the outer walls are solid cement. They pour them flat and have something like a modern barn raising. The quirky part about that is you can't run wires in solid cement, so none of the outer walls can have electrical outlets. My wonderful dad added some outlets in the ceiling so that we could plug some lights in.

It's sad to say but our last ward wasn't a great fit for us. We made a few good friends and were enjoying inviting people over for dinners, but it never felt like home. Also it's worth repeating that I don't wan't Tess to be my caregiver, so I like to hire local volunteers and pay them a little to help get me in and out of bed and such. This to me was the biggest stress of moving- finding a new person to help with my bowel care routine usually takes me a few months, and I never know if I'm making progress until the wonderful person just appears. It's always been a good experience for me once I find them (special shout out to Georgia and Delynn!) but it's STRESSFUL leading up to it! In our old ward, only one of my regular bed transfer helpers was in our ward. Everyone else lived in neighboring wards. To be fair, our old ward was a very young ward. When they split the ward I think they said we still had 180 kids under 12, so I understand most families were a little burnt out just surviving with 4 kids under 7 at home or whatever. They were all great people, it just wasn't a great fit for me partially because people didn't have energy to spare to help or even to socialize much.

This new ward probably looked a lot like the old ward 15 years ago. But now all those young kids are teens or going on missions, and everyone has rubbed shoulders with everyone else for years. We started coming to the ward over a month before moving in so we could start getting to know people and maybe get some help set up. The Elders Quorum President called and got all the details of what I needed, and the day we moved in he gave us a completely filled schedule of ward members who had volunteered to take care of everything! Including THREE different people to help with bowel care! It was a mind blowing blessing and I'm still so incredibly grateful for everyone who comes. They've all been reliable, even finding their own substitutes when needed.

Lastly, our neighbors have even come over 6+ times to work on our broken sprinklers, especially two neighbors in our circle and one neighbor down a little ways from us. Apparently our circle has the nickname of "celestial circle" since it is so ridiculously awesome. They added a new turn off valve to our secondary water and replaced a crack in our pump and changed out some broken sprinkler heads and helped us adjust their aim and so on. And for every guy that helped there has been two more that said they'd be happy to come if I asked. Our next door neighbor even pressure washed our driveway and garage, edges our lawn, and pulls the garbage cans out to the street every week.

I'm sure everyone can relate to how hard it can be to let others serve you. We all want to be independent and don't want to bother anyone or whatever our reasons are. But just remember, people are blessed when they serve, and if no one lets people serve them, then no one gets the blessings of service. Allowing someone to serve you is a service for them. For me I have some pretty obvious and straight forward needs, but for you even if you have something like a project you've wanted to do in your yard but it'd take forever to do yourself, I'd encourage you to ask your ward for help, I'm sure the youth can take a break from Fortnite sometime.

Anyway, we love it here, thanks for reading!

Life now

Other random life things… So we started having family night Monday pretty soon after marriage, seems like a good habit to set from the get go. Usually it just consists of reading an Ensign article or two. We first started with the Eternal Family and Marriage manual lessons. Mostly it seemed like pretty obvious stuff. Communicate, show love, show gratitude, manage finances, etc… an interesting memory was a chapter about anger. It said something to the effect of “right after getting married you’ll learn a lot of things about your spouse you didn’t know, and some of them will really irk you” and we paused and asked essentially “irking aside, have you learned anything new about me since we got married?” and neither of us could think of anything. We did date for 2.5 years, so I guess we knew each other pretty well. This isn’t to say we haven’t changed a bit since marriage, but there was nothing like “I had no idea you took such long showers” or “I hate how you gargle mouthwash in the mornings” or anything, it seems like we knew each other pretty well.

That being said, our lives have of course shifted a lot. For example, Tess used to regularly go to bed around 2AM, and I’d get in bed at 9PM. She’s not a morning person, and the late late evenings were the only time she could get productive peace and quiet at her home. However, in our home, I’m gone by 7:00AM, and the most disturbing thing in the house is possibly the neighbor kids running around upstairs, but even that isn’t terribly loud, and it’s easy to tune out and work since said upstairs kids will never need your attention. So it’s not necessary for Tess to stay up late in order to find productive time anymore. I have the angels that come help me with bedtime come at 9:30 PM so it’s a little later, and I have them start me laying on my side. This is important because I sit on my butt all day, and lay on my back most of the night, so if I didn’t have this time on my side my butt would almost never get a breather. I like to lay on my side for at least an hour, but can usually go for a few before my shoulder starts to hurt. So Tess usually comes back and lays with me after whoever gets me in bed. Her and I will chat for a bit, say prayer together, and then she’ll go back out and have some late night productivity. Sometimes she comes back in an hour, sometimes in three, it just depends on what she’s doing. But whenever she comes she rolls me on my back, and we cuddle to sleep. It’s wonderful.

Other minor shifts are I watch less movies in theaters, which is not a big deal because it’s just entertainment, and the time has been upgraded to time with my wife. Tess finishes crafts slower because we usually play together when we’re both home rather than be productive. I eat less Mexican food, Tess makes more meals.

We do a lot of different things together, but rarely does either of us like to pick what we will do haha. But we frequently play board games, work on our Minecraft world, watch Doctor Who or documentaries, watch movies (usually mine so far…), play other video games like Heroes of the Storm, Terraria, rollercoaster Tycoon, Pacman 256, etc. A recent discovery is I can actually give her a good back rub in bed if we sit my bed up, so we’ll do that and play a game where one comes up with a verb, replacing the chosen verb with the word smurf, and the other asks yes or no questions till they figure out what smurfing is. We love building Legos when the budget allows, and all of this still feels just like a glimpse into our time together.

Now for a deeper dive into board games. One of my favorite things about my wife that I didn’t think I’d find in my someday spouse is that she enjoys strategic board games almost as much as I do. The main difference is I love three and four player matches, and she prefers two player, but two player has really grown on me! I used to dislike two because it always seemed so obvious who was winning, and it wasn’t fun to be obviously losing OR obviously winning, but Tess and I are so evenly matched that probably only 15-20% of our games have an obvious winner for most of it. And that obvious winner still shifts between the two of us. The rest are intense duels and super fun. Also, with no distractions, we can play a full game in 30-45 minutes, and get 2-3 in a row in before bed. I love telling people “yeah, my wife beats me” and when they look confused I add “at board games”.

So I’m a little old, and a sociable fellow. As result, I tend to know a good handful of people, and most the time when Tess and I go to a public area we’ll run into someone I know. My favorite example of this is our honeymoon. We were in Cedar city, hours away from home, but we still ran into 4 people I knew, like a friend from theater in a high school, or a friend from Ventana days. The best was at the Tuacahn Tess and I were moving through the crowd and some older gentlemen steps out in front of us with a big smile, clearly expecting us to recognize him, but sadly we didn’t. He asked Tess to identify him, but she couldn’t, so he turned to me and said “you tell her” and I was like “uhhhh...” so he says “I sealed you guys like 3 days ago!”. Tess and I both were surprised and a little embarrassed haha. He took our ignorance with good grace though. But he didn’t even give us a long speech at our sealing, he just invited our parents up and dove straight into the ordinance! So there wasn’t a lot for us to remember haha.

The temple is another example of familiar people, I average about 3 different sets of people I know (and anyone who’s a regular doesn’t count). Also I like to point out when I run into a girl I did date or used to date, always followed with how happy I am I got Tess instead of them, as another means of telling Tess how much I love her. But I think she’s mostly a little… annoyed? Not quite the right word… something along those lines… anyway the point is I don’t think she likes to hear how many girls I dated before her haha.  (Tess has read this now, and she says the right word is “skeptical”, she doesn’t believe I dated this many people I guess haha)

So shortly before marriage we went furniture shopping together to furnish the empty house. Since Tess never lived outside her house, and I always lived at a pre-furnished apartment, or home, neither of us had anything in the vein of furniture or kitchen supplies. So we went around on Memorial day (sales!) shopping for a couch and a table. But it took a long while haha. I’m kind of excited for the next time we go furniture shopping. Neither of us are super decisive with stuff like this. Tess is crafty, and cares more how things look, but the problem was we couldn’t think in terms of “what would look good in the living room?” because the answer was “depends on all the other decisions we also haven’t finalized on yet”. We eventually found a great couch and counter height table. But NEXT time we shop, even if it’s because we’re moving to a new house, we’ll be able to say things like “this would go well with our table” so I expect it’ll go a little easier, but probably not tons easier.

Counter height table! This is the greatest thing! I originally discovered how nice it was when living with Bryla, but even more so now. What’s magical is my chair actually fits under the table (for reference most tables are more like the height of my knees. My joystick apparatus is like 3 inches taller than my knees though, and as result I don’t fit under most tables). This makes tons of thing easier like eating noodles and soup way, building Legos or puzzles, or the best one, playing board games. Rarely do I have to say “I’ll go there. No there. Left of that. Your other left of that. Yes there.” anymore, now I can reach to pick up and place my own pieces, and collect my own currency. I’m sure my occupational therapists from a decade ago would be proud :D

So Tess consistently told me how much she hated cooking, but also anytime someone made it sound like she couldn’t cook she defended herself and pointed out all the holiday meals she made at her grandma’s and such. She also used to talk about how when she moved out she planned to make soups or other easy meals to make in bulk and then use for the next 5 meals in a row. So getting married I didn’t really know what to expect from her. Gratefully, she hates the idea of spending money on pre-made food every night more than the idea of cooking so she started making meals almost right out of the marriage gate. And she’s a fantastic cook! It’s still not her favorite thing, but she doesn’t HATE it anymore. I’ve loved it though haha. Her biggest hang up was that her mom’s recipes are too much food, often even we cut them down to 25%.

I had a few month phase at the turn of the year where I was working late a lot, this is less directly marriage related, but work was rough. I’ve worked for Vivint since April 1st 2014 (yeah I started on April Fools. I was a little worried I’d show up and not really have a job haha) and while software isn’t Vivint’s export directly, they’re definitely a company that understands the important role of Software in modern business success. They had a pretty good understanding of a healthy software development environment. Somehow starting back in December though it seems like they forgot a major axiom, “if you need to pull a new item of work into the sprint, you have to push something of equal size out”. Somehow stuff kept getting pulled in and nothing got pushed out, and we were just expected to deliver all of it. With the exception of Christmas and the Mexico trip, I worked 8AM-9PM pretty almost every workday (luckily weekends were still mostly sacred :P) from early December all the way through late January, and from there we started slowly tapering off to less and less late days. By the end of March I probably averaged one 8-9 workday a sprint, and it by April we finally got approval to slow down enough to make things robust rather than frantically adding features in and abandoning them to work on the next feature even though the alpha version we shipped needs work still. So slowing was great news! But it was really hard. Even through March when I only worked a handful of late nights, it still felt like any night MIGHT need to be a late night, I never really knew until like 4:30. Made it hard to tell Tess I’d be home, or make dinner plans with friends. I’ve learned a lot about what processes I can help support to prevent us from getting that deep though. And I’ve definitely re-affirmed from this that I am NOT a workaholic. I need to go home. However work did pay me a meaningful amount in bonuses and gave me an unexpectedly large raise! So it’s paid off monetarily, and hasn’t seemed to permanently alienate my wife. But it was rough, ugh.

So I’ve wanted to work in the temple for like four years. I don’t have a strong testimony of the temple, and serving there seems like a good thing to do regardless. So I first tried to do so four years ago, but the Bishop turned me down because he was about to call me as the Elders Quorum President and they didn’t want me to be overloaded. So that delayed it 18 or so months until I moved in with Bryla. First thing in my new ward there I tried to work in the temple too, but the new Provo City Center temple was almost built and they wanted to save temple workers for that, so I couldn’t start then either. Before it opened I ended up moving home, at which point I was far enough along dating Tess that I thought marriage soon might be possible, and didn’t look into being a temple worker. Finally after Tess and I were married, we talked about it and she agreed to join me, and we started working in the Oquirrh Mountain Temple in September, and we’ve worked there every Saturday it’s open from 1:45PM-6PM since. It’s been a great experience.

I love seeing different people I know every week. The job we’re doing rotates every 45 minutes so you never get super bored. I can help with basically everything but initiatory and endowments. I do baptism confirmations with one hand. When I’m doing the reception desk every once in a while when someone pulls out their wallet I kindly tell them we don’t accept bribes. I can’t effectively tell stories right now apparently. It has definitely been a sacrifice, and I’m not sure either of us feel like our testimony has been strengthened (as much as i’d like to claim it has). But I’m sure we’re being blessed by our service, and I always am in a good mood in there and come out in a good mood, and we can still sleep in on Saturdays.

So I distinctly remember once a time being excited to be married because people in my life were drama at that time, and I felt like my family were the only friends I needed, so if I found a wife I wouldn’t need to keep socializing with other people. This was of course silly, no question I’d miss Micah and Bryla and Neal and other people who I don’t see nearly as often as I’d like (I know this with certainty now based on empirical evidence), but the weird part is that my family is actually kinda boring now! *gasp!* I’ve got to clarify, I still love my siblings, and my siblings in isolation are still fun to be around. But now that my parents are up to 15 grandkids, family parties are pretty crazy, and no one can play with us anymore, and for the most part everyone just wants to hear about how we’re doing and then talk about kids. The kids can be fun, if we bust out a jackbox game or something we can have a jolly ol’ time. And the grandkids are of course super cute, so going to the second Sunday family dinner is generally worth it (seeing as fun isn’t the only reason to go). But what’s MORE fun is going to Tessa’s family every Sunday (except the 2nd Sunday Campbell dinner). Tessa’s siblings are 8F 14M 16M 18F and 21F, and we can even coax her mom and/or dad into playing certain games with us sometimes. The boys are getting into strategic games, so we can play things like Thunderstone with them (usually co-op). And while playing jackbox games with all the Campbell grandkids can be fun in a silly way, Tessa’s family is old enough for it to be witty, and more of a competition. So, Tess and I have had a tradition of going over there basically any Sunday night we don’t have plans for months (which usually means every Sunday except the 2nd Sunday) and it’s been great. Maybe once we get pregnant the Campbell family dinner will light up a bit again. But that’s not in the near term plans.

Well, there's a bunch of random stuff for ya. Actually I wrote most of this months ago and never got around to posting it, so some of it even feels outdated already (ie: work has changed like 30 times, but it's in a great place, and I don't feel like writing details now :P), but I figured I'd post it anyway. If you're reading this and your curious about any specific aspect of our lives, feel free to comment or ping me somehow, and I'll be more likely to blog about it knowing someone is interested :)

In conclusion of this post though, basically this only touches on 1% of all the stories I've shared with Tess, and being married is my favorite! I feel like we're really spoiled with how often we get to play together, and how healthy we usually are, and how we have so many awesome people in our life that we can't make time to see them all, and how financially stable we feel, and so on. It's probably a blessing of serving in 3 callings (ward, stake, temple).

My Wonderful Tess

Blog time! And what I’d really love to do is write a bunch about my wonderful wife Tess. Honestly it’s embarrassing looking back at my journals and seeing how little I wrote about her. We dated for 2.5 years! But there is hardly anything. Note It was a low journaling time frame anyway, but I still wrote enough and on days when Tess was definitely in the picture that you’d think I would have mentioned Tess more. Especially because I discussed her at length with all sorts of people in my life on many many occasions.

Tess journals about almost every day consistently (usually 3 days or so at a time, but still). So if I’m dead and you’re reading this to figure out what more of my dating experience with Tess was like, you’ll have to get the nitty gritties from Tessa’s journal. Hopefully she’ll let you read it. Or if she’s dead too and she can’t stop you. If we’re both dead you totally have my permission to read her journal, she’ll doubtless be embarrassed about stuff but I’ll make it up to her up here.

Anyway, when she pointed out my low mention of her I thought about and I realized why. There are two major reasons. First, we didn’t get married until I was 30. As result, I had dated A LOT. You can go back through my journals and find all sorts of details about various other people I dated in the past. And even I got tired of reading about these two great dates I had with so-and-so in one entry, and then my entry two weeks later was just the whole thing didn’t work out and I didn’t have anything more to add. So I all but officially decided not to write about dating stuff unless I was officially dating the girl.

Second, Tess and I weren’t officially dating for most of our our 2.5 year courtship. Which is silly to say, because I called her every night (even after either of us went on a date with someone else), and we went out at least once a week almost the entire duration. So, are these valid reasons for not writing more? Probably not, but that’s what happened haha.

However, now we’ve been married for 7 months! And I want to give a deeper glimpse into our relationship. I’ll probably jump all over with this, sorry in advance.

One big thing that has shaped our relationship both pre and post marriage is each of our disabilities. Mine is obvious, being in a wheelchair makes it harder to go dancing (which Tess loves, and we do at times anyway) or travel, or visit our friends in their homes (which is fine because they’re all happy to come to ours). Tessa’s was alluded lightly to in our dating story posters I posted last August, but it explains a lot of her preferences.

During the six weeks of silence Tess struggled a lot and eventually saw a therapist who diagnosed Tess with a sensory disorder. Basically my understanding of this is that bright lights, loud noises, and physical touch all just impact Tess exponentially more than most people. Everyone’s first instinct (including mine) is just to disregard this and is basically to assume she can shrug it off, it’s just lights or noise, she’ll get over it. And really this approach is probably what Tess would tell you, she doesn’t like special attention, and technically she’ll get over it. Apparently the best she can explain it is when her body gets all this sensory input and she doesn’t know what to do with it, it tenses her up, and shuts her brain down. If Tess and I go to a movie at the movie theater, it tenses her up so much that she comes home and literally shakes for hours at times.

The movie aspect has been particularly interesting because I used to go to the theaters and see pretty much every appropriate movie that came out that interested me, but Tess never wanted to go. Note that she was only diagnosed a year before we were married, so even she didn’t really understand why she didn’t like movie theaters (or more accurately, she didn’t understand why anyone else did) so during most of our dating we didn’t have this base knowledge to frame our understand of experiences on. Even her family doesn’t really seem to grasp this, but they’re learning.

There’s two ways I can think to relate to it. Everyone can relate to whatever noise going on being too loud, like standing right in front of a speaker at a party, or the shock of the sound level in a movie when it first starts. For me, I quickly acclimate to the volume at a movie so easily that the first shocking burst of sound isn’t even a big deal anymore. But I still wouldn’t park in front of a speaker at a dance party. Imagine if our regular noise level feels more like standing in front of a speaker for Tess? If you had to do that for 3 hours straight, it’d leave you tense too.

The other analogy I can think of is sometimes when I’m sick, usually with some sort of fever, my whole body feels sensitive. Or how aware you are of even light touch when you have a bad sunburn. Now, this isn’t to say Tess feels pain at any light touch, you don’t have to treat her like glass, but a lot of touch just seems to have this level of unpleasantness to it. That being said, expectation does seem to mitigate this a lot, to the point where if she’s expecting to hug you it’s not unpleasant, and somehow any touch from me seems ok now (more on this later), but one of her biggest pet peeves is still when old ladies have to hold her arm the whole time they’re speaking to her. Physical touch from strangers is super uncomfortable still.

Oh, one more thing, she apparently has a hard time interpreting what people’s facial expressions mean. It’s probably genetic, at least one of her sisters says she’s the same way. But it makes it a little awkward for her in social circumstances with people you don’t know well when it’s hard to understand their facial cues. Another factor in her being more introverted than me.

That foundation being set, it explains a lot of Tessa’s preferences. She prefers to listen to a show more than watch it because their facial expressions confuse her a bit the first time, she likes shows much more once she knows the whole story because it’s easier to understand their expressions when she knows the full context. She dislikes movie theaters because of the assault of noise and color. She didn’t like hugs because of the surprise touch. She didn’t like being in groups of people over like 4 because the awkwardness of reading faces, plus the likely risk of noise and stranger touch. Etc.

One super interesting exception to all of this though is dance. Apparently people with a sensory disorder benefit greatly from some sort of physically taxing outlet they enjoy. For Tess that is dance, preferably Lindy Hop swing dancing. “But that includes loud noises! And touching strangers! That doesn’t make sense!” Yeah maybe, apparently is it’s the expectation, but she loves it. At dance she knows what to do with all this intense sensory input, that loud beat coming in is the rhythm to dance to. That pressure on the small of your back means they want you to spin, and so on. She loves it, and it’s beautiful to watch her dance.

I’ve known I wanted Tess for a long time. Our first date she gave me a hug, and she sat on my lap and rode to the car, and at the time she seemed totally comfortable with it. Angels must have been there holding back her anxieties on the first date, because it took us around a year after that before I could even lightly put my arm around the back of her chair. I’m grateful I had that experience of what it was like physically if she was comfortable around me, because it helped give the patience to work back up to it.

In dating various different potential concerns popped up and left, but the two biggest most consistent ones I remember talking about a lot was physical touch, and feeling loved. I know physical touch is my number one language of love. And I don’t just mean intimate touch. I mean even with a friend, an excited wave from across the room just seems to carry way less weight for me as a greeting than a hug, or even a hand on the shoulder as they pass by wordlessly without making eye contact. Also, in the hospital they explained that for people who lose sensation in most of their body, touch in the places they can feel tends to become more important than usual. So I double knew I needed touch. Understanding at least that touch was hard for Tess for some reason was a big concern for me.

Feeling loved was the other big one. My number one language of love was already off the table, but even though I was willing to accept that, her not being willing to be a couple didn’t inspire confidence. And her not being ready to be official also meant that I couldn’t regularly express how much I cared about her, or it made her feel bad. I had a handful of people who wanted me to move on from Tess primarily due to this aspect. I just always thought there would be some breakthrough where touch would be completely ok like the first date, and she’d be able to show love for me like I wanted to show for her.

Sorry this blog has been a bit of a drag so far, but here’s where we start ramping up to happier stuff! For the most part I’d say we never made any all at once breakthroughs. We just slowly progressed. This is silly to look back on, but I think the first big step in touch was playing a board game, she let me put my hand between on her knee between her crossed legs and leave it there. Handholding v0.3!  But over time she got used to my hugs, a year or so in she let me put my arm around the back of her chair, then progressively more on her shoulders. Eventually she’d let me kiss her cheek good night if I asked (and I always had to ask), or hold her hands for short bursts if I asked. Then she’d start doing these things even if I didn’t ask, but I could tell it took effort, she was just doing it for me because she understood it meant a lot to me.

At the point we got married, holding hands everywhere felt natural to me. I guess there’s a good chance she’s just super good at faking it now, but it feels to me like she actually enjoys holding hands, or my arm around her, or snuggles in general. Seven months into marriage, our regular morning routine is after whoever gets me out of bed around 6:50ish I remove an armrest on my chair, go back into the bedroom, park next to the bed, and quietly say “I love you” to Tess. If she’s awake enough to hear me (most days) she crawls over and into my lap, places her head on my chest, and we just snuggle silently for 5-10 minutes before i go off to work. I can’t express how grateful I am for little things like this. I’m sure one day we won’t be able to maintain this routine for whatever reason, but this time is very special to me.

Tess also curls up on my lap when I get home from work, when either of us is unhappy or uncomfortable for any reason, or any other number of times. We hold hands on and off as appropriate through church or symphonies or whatever. She kisses me goodbye and kisses me hello.

One of the most common questions we get asked, or our friends get asked if people are afraid to ask us, is “can you have sex?” And the answer is yes. I won’t go into detail on marriage only level intimacy, but even here we are doing wonderfully. Anyone who could see the frequency or depth of our physical intimacy now wouldn’t worry about us at all :).

As for feeling loved. For the longest time the only real indicator I had that she liked me was that she’d answer every night when I’d call, resist ending the call, and she’d let me take her out every week. She’s a strong woman, and I knew she wouldn’t keep doing something she didn’t want to. Earlier on I heard through her sister and mom how much Tess liked me, that she was somehow able to tell them, but unable to verbally express to me haha. Eventually we worked up to her saying cute things like “it’s not as terrible to be around you” or “I guess it’s more ok now”. At some point during our courting we were at a point where it was clear we were only seeing each other, but we weren’t official enough to say “I love you” and her be comfortable. But I needed to say it somehow, so in a conversation we somehow ended on the random word “platypus” as our code word for “I love you”. We used it all the time for quite a while until we could just say I love you for real, and now it’s just a cute rare use word. I got her a stuffed platypus for Valentines day 2016, and we both had the plan to get these Lego platypus’ for each other, so we did that for date night in March sometime. Now she tells me she loves me almost as often as I tell her, and I tell her multiple times a day. Also now she makes meals she knows I love, watches movies with me she knows I love, tries out video games she’s not sure she’ll like, she tells me she misses me when I stay late at work, and in short does all sorts of things to let me know I’m appreciated and loved, including saying it straight out. I’ve never been so happy!

I could go on about specific stories but this post is already huge so I think I'll leave it here for now. But here's some pics of our Platypodes.