Warning Signs

Image credit: Photo by kaladan on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

I went for a checkup recently, and as I waited for the doctor, I read some of the brochures in the office about heart disease, diabetes, cancer... And found that in nearly every brochure, one of the symptoms listed for cancer was "no symptoms or vague symptoms."

I have two friends who have been diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer. They have sent out their stories along with lists of warning signs: things they now see clearly, things they think they should have caught, little things that now loom big, the vague symptoms that came only near the time they were diagnosed. And it's easy for me to look at those lists and think, "Oh, I would definitely have gotten that checked out right away. It seems really obvious there was something wrong." Yep, I'd be safe from cancer. I'd notice.

Of course, when I weave together the story of my life with my husband, the hidden addiction seems obvious: like a single red thread winding its way through white cloth. Just as it is for my friends who have cancer, it's easy to see things in retrospect, to look over that list of warning signs of infidelity or sex addiction in a trashy magazine and say, "Yes, that was there and that was too." It's easy to feel foolish, to think the pattern was there, perfectly visible, for anyone to see. It's easy to believe that I know what to look for even now. But it's the narrative that makes it appear that way.

It's impossible to truly tell my story the way I saw it at the time. In a single day, there are 24 hours; there are 1440 minutes; there are 86,400 seconds. In a year there are nearly 9 thousand hours; there are over half a million minutes; and there are over 31 million seconds. In the period of a little over nine years that my husband and I lived together — sharing the same house, the same phone, the same computer, the same bank account, the same credit cards — there were over 3 thousand days; around 80 thousand hours; nearly 5 million minutes; nearly 300 million seconds.  And that's not even getting to the years we knew each other, loved each other, were intimate with each other before we lived together.

Days, weeks, months, sometimes even years, would go by without any indication that anything was wrong. Then there would be silence again, before another little blip on the radar.  I thought the pattern was what happened most often; it took a long time to see that the breaks in the pattern were themselves a pattern, although now, when I write, when I remember, it seems obvious.  I condense the story down, I write out the old pattern, the one that seemed predominant, because I can't remember every single one of those intervening ordinary moments, and certainly no one would want to read them even if I could.

They'd be a very long version of something like this: Mark woke up and kissed me. He showered, humming happily, while I lay in bed listening to the water run before I got up.  He got dressed. I got dressed. We said we loved each other. We chatted about the day ahead. We went to work. He walked out the door for work at exactly the same time every day. A minute later he walked back in the door because he'd forgotten his wallet or his keys or some paper he needed. We called each other during the day just to say "hi" or "I love you" or "I'm on my way home now." He'd come home on time every day, and he'd always call me before he left work to ask what we were doing for dinner or if he should pick anything up from the store on the way home or if I would. We'd have dinner. We'd chat about our day and our work and our coworkers. We'd watch TV. We'd laugh. We'd kiss. We'd say, "I love you." We'd go to bed, together.

Repeat every day for hundreds of days.

He'd be a few hours late for just one day.  One day.  Out of thousands.

Weeks would go by.

He'd stay up late on the computer one night and then it would be back to our normal pattern.  A few hours.  Out of tens of thousands.

A month would go by.

He'd mention a new friend.  A few seconds.  Out of hundreds of millions of seconds.

Several more months would go by.

He'd call her.  A few minutes.  Out of millions of minutes.

Years would go by. During which I'd never hear about the friend again.

He'd stay up late on the computer for a few nights.  Another small blip in the thousands of nights we'd spent together where he wasn't on the computer.

Hundreds more days would go by...

Just as cancer in its later stages produces more (and more severe) symptoms, when Mark's addiction escalated, the time between incidents shortened and the pattern became more evident.  But when he disclosed the full extent of his actions during addiction, there truly were encounters (particularly early on) that I knew nothing about and would never have known about or suspected if he hadn't told me.  There were no odd receipts, no phone calls, no travel, no late nights at work, no strange withdrawals from the bank account, no unusual smells or actions.  They were one time incidents that happened while I was out of town on business or he was out of town on business or I was working (or working late). There was no way to feel those first few cancer cells growing.  There was no way to feel the impact of a tumor smaller than a pin's head.  The aberration wasn't big enough to be recognized yet.

And I realized that I can't be safe from cancer or sex addiction or anything else, even if I know the warning signs.  Sometimes there simply are no symptoms or only vague symptoms.  Until the end.