#$%&*#@##$!! Enter your own swear word here.

He just called me. He's at the hospital. Getting a pain reliever shot for his back.
Only I know and on a good day he knows, that it's not his back that's the problem.

He goes to the hospital for this stuff when he's depressed. And it costs me $60 a pop for an E.R. visit. He did not try anything to relieve the depression, like all of his "people" have told him to do.

I know he believes this pain is real. But there's a pattern to it, and he is unable to see it. He never has back pain before he is depressed. He gets the back pain after he is depressed. Then he goes to the E.R. and gets all hopped up on narcotics and "feels better". The last time this happened, before he was hospitalized for mental illness, he was given the maximum dose of Dilaudid for his back, and it "didn't do any good". Of course not. You can't "dilaudid" depression.

When he is "my DH", he readily admits that there is a definite psychological connection between "back pain" and depression/mental health symptoms. But when he is not "my DH", he doesn't even hear me when I remind him about it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not pooh-poohing DH's back pain. But he's had every test imaginable, and lots of pain treatments that people usually only get when they're about to die of cancer, and still, the only thing that relieves his pain is relieving his depression.

I may have noted that it has now been almost a year since he's "needed" to go to the E.R. for this reason. Coincidentally, it's been almost a year since he was hospitalized for three weeks due to his mental illness. Apparently a big step backwards was taken tonite, and I'm so disappointed I could just cry.

And this little voice keeps popping in to my brain to say, "how much longer are you going to put yourself through this?" Right now, that's not a question I can honestly answer.