I hate getting sick. Always have, but never so much as I do now when married to Matt. Matt’s AuDHD and nursing me do not go together! Let me give you a not so hypothetical example. Imagine I am sick enough to be confined to bed. I have to rely on Matt for the simplest of things. Our day will go something like the following:

Me: I’m not going to be able to do anything today so I will need your help.

Him: Of course. You just stay there and rest. I’ll do everything. (He really is a kind good hearted man my husband)

Me: Will it be OK with work?

Him: Yes, it’s fine. I’ll just work from home. I’ll log on now.

He leaves. Two hours later when he still hasn’t come back and I am desperate for a drink and the toilet I call him. He doesn’t hear me. I call him on his mobile phone. He has it switched to silent so he is not disturbed at work. I call my own landline and eventually, after it rings for a while, he answers. He has completely forgotten that I am upstairs ill because he is absorbed in work. His extremely poor short term memory was highlighted as part of his diagnosis, this combined with his hyperfocus means I may as well not exist right now. He tells me he is just doing something but he will be up in a minute.

Me: I do need the toilet

Unfortunately for me I have forgotten about the need to be direct at this point. I should have said “I need your help getting to the toilet right now” but since I didn’t he has now hung up and gone back to work.

After another half hour I decide he has definitely forgotten again (and I really do need the toilet now!) so I make another call. Turns out he has not forgotten but he thought only 5 minutes had gone by – having no awareness of time is another feature of his AuDHD.

He helps me to go to the toilet and then goes off to make my coffee.

Sometime later:

Me: Matt have you got my coffee?

Him: Oh sorry, I had put the kettle on, I’ll get it now.

Me: Would you mind bringing some painkillers as well?

Him: Of course.

Short time after:

Him: Do we have any painkillers? Are they in the box?

Me: Yes.

He arrives with the painkillers.

Me: Thanks, have you got the coffee?

Him: Yes, just coming.

He goes.

Sometime later

Me: Matt, the coffee…

And so we continue. Eventually we get to way past where I would have put lunchtime. Matt often doesn’t recognise that he is hungry when he is busy doing something and we have already established that he does not go by the clock.

Me: Matt, are you going to make some lunch for the boys?

Him: Yes, I’ll do it. What are we having?

Me: I haven’t decided on anything, you’ll have to look,

A short while after lunch one of the boys will come and see me.

Me: Did Dad get you some lunch?

Them: Yes, it was yellow tea.

Me: Oh, what was it today?

Them: Pasta, sweetcorn and quorn munchies.

These are all things that are in the same colour palette of yellow. Matt finds it difficult to decide what should be in a meal so to make it easier he often just does everything in the fridge of the one colour. Today’s tea is not too bad. At least it has got most of the constituents of a meal. And to be fair on Matt, he has now moved beyond yellow tea. Mostly now they get yellow tea with vegetables.

Short time later:

Me to Matt: Did you get me anything?

Him: Oh, did you want something. You didn’t say. I can get you something now.

I hope you don’t think I am mocking Matt in this because I am not. We laugh about this type of thing together now and I have shown him this before posting it. Before I knew his diagnosis though I used to get so mad about days like this. Why, I used to think, can he not just look after me when I am sick? Why must it be so hard? Why doesn’t he care that I am sick? Why doesn’t he care about me? And down I would spiral.  But now I know and I know how hard it is for him to do these things, especially when I am sick so the routine of the day is changed and that has already upset his autistic desire for routine, now I know all this I am just really grateful that he does as well as he does. But I hate being sick and generally I just try to keep going until something really wipes me out because as hard as that is, it is often the easier option.

Of course, sometimes it is Matt that gets sick and that is also difficult. The sensory sensitivity that he has means that being ill and having physical symptoms is really hard for him to cope with. It is like he gets everything you would get with a normal illness but turned up loud. I hate to see him like that. Our big fear during the pandemic was that he would get Covid and have to be alone and isolated from us, particularly if he had to go into hospital alone or alternatively that I would get it and have to isolate because we didn’t know how Matt would cope. We took what people would probably have called unnecessary precautions but to us the risk was too high. For a long time I used to think we made too much of a fuss about keeping away from people when they were ill but I now realise that even getting sick is never simple in a neurodiverse household.