Weddingbee Blog

Preface: My boyfriend and I aren’t talking about marriage, or planning (at this point) to get married (we’re both still in grad school)… but here’s my story anyways.

My boyfriend gave me morphine.

Let me back up and give the story now. This may be TMI coming up, but I think it’s necessary to the story.

During my junior year in college, I found myself completely wracked with abdominal pains. The NYU health center diagnosed me with “gas” (those charlatans) and prescribed “gas-x” which was completely mortifying to purchase. Well, the day after that, I went in to the hospital with pains so severe that I couldn’t stand up straight. After running about $5000 worth of tests, and keeping me off pain medication (so they could more accurately “diagnose”) they sent me home with horse-sized Tylenol and a diagnosis of mittelschmerz, which can be translated from German to mean: excruciating pain that comes in waves and probably parallels that of labor, associated with the releasing of the egg from the ovaries during the middle of your 28-day cycle.

Then last year, right after I had met my boyfriend and we had gotten serious (which happened relatively quickly- in the course of a couple weeks), late one night I started having pains again. He drove me to the Elmhurst ER at about 4am and stayed up with me the entire morning, day, and next night, never leaving my side. Through an MRI, ultrasounds, pelvics, and lord knows what else, he was holding my hand or talking to the doctors making sure that I was getting the best care possible (he’s going into the medical field). And when the nurses weren’t responsive enough, and the pain was literally unbearable, he was there to carefully, caaaarefully increase my morphine drip just enough so that I went back to sleep.

When I think back to that terrible weekend in the hospital, and how hopeless and frustrated I felt, and how much pain I was in, it helped me so much to see him there every time I woke up. He was by my side the whole time, and was so supportive. He knew how to talk to the doctors and get everyone involved, and reassured me beyond words. To this day - even when I was walking out of the hospital doors - they never came up with a diagnosis.

For him to have done all that for me, after only weeks of dating, seeing me at my absolute worst and loving me all the same…. That is romantic, to me.

Amy
New York, NY