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Care
Partner of the Month
March / April Mark Ryan Yonkers, NY The difficulty and frustration of losing a lifetime companion is difficult enough within itself, but Mark has demonstrated a remarkable amount of strength and courage as he continues to recover from the grief of his loss while at the same time fighting his way through personal physical challenges and looking forward to forging a new life. Mark says: "It was August 18, 2000. Frank's physical condition was perfect. He was 62 and had never had any physical problems at all. There was nothing wrong with him. We owned a two-family house and he was painting upstairs and doing the normal work you do when you have a house. We had dinner, he went back upstairs and then came back down and said, "Mark, I need some air." He took two Excedrin because some kind of headache might be coming on. He went back out the door and before I knew it he sat down and said, "No ambulance, no ambulance…" and then his speech became slurred as he repeated, "N-o-o-o a-a-a-m-b-u-l-a-a-a-n-c-e." I called emergency and by the time I got back from the phone he was laid out on the ground and that was basically it. Before I knew it he was gone already. It all happened in no more than 10 minutes. He had suffered from an aneurysm in the brain stem, which completely cut off everything. So the minute it exploded, his brain filled with blood and that was basically it - there was nothing they could do. But they said that's something you're born with and you don't know you have it. It hits some people in their 40's and hits some at 60, so Frank actually outlived it by 2 years. He had never complained of headaches or tingling sensations or anything. I had known him and lived with him for 25 years. When it first happened it blew my mind because one minute we were cooking and eating dinner together and the next minute he was lying on the concrete and being taken by the ambulance. The first night was a whole big mess, because I was worried about him and worried about what I was going to do because I have muscular dystrophy. But after his death I still had to run here and there. Frank would never call himself my caretaker because even though I couldn't bend anymore I was still basically in good shape when Frank died, except for getting up and down, which is still a problem to this day.
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