Missing You (Song for Hannah), part 1

In 2005, my wife went to Cambodia on an internship and nearly died. Track #7 on evolution was written while I was waiting for her to be medically evacuated.

Obviously, this is going to be a long story. And unlike other times when you’ve heard that, when it basically means “I’m not in the mood to tell you right now,” you’re going to get the story. But because of its length, I’m going to break it up into parts and run them all this week.

Ready?

I met Hannah back in 1993. Now, you can be like the kid in “The Princess Bride” and skip the mushy stuff . . . just scroll down past this paragraph and you’ll be alright. I had given up on the concept of marriage back in the 1992; I was fairly hardheaded and cynical about a lot of things. If you’d told me there was such a thing as love at first sight, I would have made the raspberry and rolled my eyes. Then came Hannah. The day we met, I knew it was the most important thing in the world for me to talk to her. And I did. We went on our first date that afternoon, and we’ve been together ever since . . . nearly 14 years.

Back yet? Good. There is nothing more distressing than to see someone you love in pain. For years, I was in that situation: Hannah would, periodically, break out in hives. If left untreated, she suffer uncontrollable itching and scratching; meanwhile, she would start swelling up, a prelude to anaphylactic shock.

Clearly, this was some sort of allergic reaction. The problem was . . . we had no idea what was causing it. We went to allergist after allergist, and never found any answers.

It seemed our lives contained an invisible sniper, a killer that lurked nearby and periodically endangered my wife’s life at random. We had no idea where to look. Over years of affliction, we noticed some patterns:

• The attacks had a tendency to occur on the weekends.
• The attacks tended to occur outside.
• The attacks usually happened in the morning.

Now, we live in Florida, and there are some weird factors in play down here. For one, a lot of neighborhoods have lawn services that 1.) spray for fire ants and 2.) treat the lawns with some sort of alchemical mixture that turns them into homogeneous Stepford Wives-type lawns.

Hannah had reacted badly to fire ant pesticide before. Our only theory was that, maybe, the lawn services were coming by on Friday evenings and spraying some sort of chemical–which she would react to the next morning.

It was a poor theory, and wrong, but it was all we had besides questions.

To be continued tomorrow.