I got my feeding tube in November 2019, and I remember thinking I was stepping into a strange, minor detour, not a whole new life. In my head it was almost… logical. I’d get the tube, my body would stabilize, and everything would go back to “normal,” my baseline, with the one obvious exception that I’d just eat through my J-tube. I can still feel how sincerely I believed that. Like the feeding tube was going to be the hard part, the big change, and then we’d manage it and move on.
I didn’t realize I was standing at the beginning of something that would reshape nearly every part of my life.
I didn’t even slow down the way most people would. As soon as they released me, I went right back to life. I started working a full-time job in December 2019, and then my husband and I finally started dating in January 2020. What’s wild is we’d actually met years earlier, back in July 2013, but our lives didn’t align until later. By the time we started dating, I already had my tube, so from the beginning this wasn’t a relationship that started in some perfectly simple chapter. He didn’t meet the version of me that had never had to think about nutrition and medical logistics. He met me already living inside a body that had changed, and I truly believed the story was still going to be straightforward from there: tube in place, back to work, back to baseline, life goes on.
Six years ago, we were still new as a couple. Not new to knowing each other, but new to the “this is real” version of us, the day-to-day version. Our relationship was not yet mature. We weren’t battle-tested. We were learning each other in that sweet, naive way where you assume the future is going to be relatively predictable, even if it’s busy. I remember a moment so clearly it still makes my throat tighten. He asked me, “So now what?” In response, I told him what I believed to be truly the answer, that I’d keep working, stabilize, get back to baseline, and we’d do life. I was being truthful and trying to give both of us something solid to stand on. I didn’t know I was offering him a version of the future that didn’t exist, not because God wasn’t good, but because I did not know what this road was about to look like. Even then, I see God’s hand now: He steadied my husband, opened the doors for us when I couldn’t, and carried us through days we thought we wouldn’t survive.
This has been quite the journey for both of us, and something neither of us expected. A road without a map, without breaks, and without answers when you want them most.
It’s 2026 now, and I am fighting things I never thought I’d be fighting six years ago. Not just feeding tube life and the logistics of nutrition. I mean everything that snowballed around it. The infections, the complications, the constant recalculating. The hospital stays that stopped feeling “rare” and started feeling like part of the rhythm of our lives. When I went back through my pictures and tried to track the timeline from late 2021 through 2023, I counted at least sixteen hospitalizations. Sixteen. That is not “a rough patch.” That is your body living in emergency mode and your mind learning how to brace by default. I can remember nights when I couldn’t form a big, articulate prayer, only a sentence on repeat. Help me. Help me. Help me. And somehow, even when my faith felt like a whisper, God met me there anyway.
People hear “sepsis” and think of it like a single crisis you either survive or you don’t, like you get treated and you go home and the story ends. But repeated blood infections and repeated hospitalizations don’t just hurt your body. They mess with your sense of safety, teach your nervous system that calm is suspicious, and turn rest into something your body doesn’t fully trust. Survival takes up so much space that it squeezes out the parts of you that used to feel light. It changes what “normal” means. It changes what your face holds.
Something happened in 2021 that aged me a lot, and I hate seeing it. I didn’t “just” get older. I can look back through photos and feel that punch in my stomach, because I can see it in my face. The softness changes. The brightness in my eyes looks muted. My skin looks different. The tired isn’t normal tired. It’s survival tired, the kind that settles in your features when your body has been fighting too long. I look in the mirror and I see this tired mom, barely getting through each day, doing the basics when I can, pushing when I have to, and now and then trying to pull myself together to look half decent for an event or a school thing or whatever life demands that week. It’s not vanity or my trying to be impressive. It’s me trying to feel like myself for a minute. Sometimes it feels like I’m putting a “fine” face over exhaustion and hoping nobody notices what’s underneath. But I notice. I notice because I live in this body. I notice because I remember who I was before my body became a battleground. On the worst days, I ask God for something I used to take for granted: just enough strength for what’s in front of me, and just enough grace not to hate the person I see reflected.
And then someone said it out loud. “You look so different between your marriage and your wedding.” We got legally married on 6/19/21 and had our wedding on 6/18/22, one year apart, basically the same date on the calendar, like it should’ve been this seamless continuation. I remember the exact second that sentence hit me. My stomach dropped, and my throat tightened. My mind did that fast, involuntary flip through images I didn’t ask to relive. I could hear myself saying in my head, of course I do. Of course I do. I know people don’t always mean harm, and photos can look wildly different because of lighting, angles, hair, makeup, stress, sleep, the way a lens distorts you. I understand that. But it still landed like confirmation that what I’ve been quietly noticing isn’t just in my head. Like, oh… you can see it too. You can see the year that happened to me. You can see the cost.
The year between “we signed the papers” and “we stood in front of everyone” wasn’t just a cute newlywed season for us. It wasn’t a year of planning and excitement and normal stress. It was a year of my body doing things I didn’t understand, of symptoms stacking, of fear creeping in, of learning how to be a couple while also learning how to survive. My husband loved me in a way I’d never imagined love could appear, with patience and steadiness and quiet strength. It was a year when I learned marriage isn’t just romance and partnership. Sometimes it’s reality. And sometimes reality is tubes and fatigue and appointments and nights that don’t feel safe. Despite that, somehow, God was present in it too, not as a cliché, but as actual provision, the kind that shows up in a person who stays, in a moment of peace that makes no sense, in the way you get through a night you were sure would break you.
I think one of the strangest parts of all of this is how it seeps into normal moments until “normal” isn’t normal anymore, and I need to say this because I think people assume I’m being metaphorical when I’m not: stairs are genuinely hard for me to walk. Not “I’m out of shape” hard. Not “I’m being dramatic” hard but hard in the real, physical way where your legs don’t cooperate the way they used to and your body has to work for every step. Going down is worse than going up. Going down takes control, balance, and trust in your ankles and knees and the messages your body is supposed to send your brain about where you are in space. Down is the part where I feel my stomach drop a little because I know one wrong move could turn into a stumble, and I’m painfully aware of how fast a stumble can become a fall. I never thought I would look at a staircase and do a quick internal calculation before moving, but now I do. Now I hold the rail. I step carefully. I focus harder than I should have to on something that used to be automatic.
And there’s grief in that. Genuine grief. I’m grieving the ease I once had, the face I had before survival etched itself into my expression. Grief for the version of me who thought she’d just “get back to baseline.” Grief for the girl my husband started dating in 2020, who truly believed this would be manageable and temporary. And if I’m honest, there’s anger too, not loud anger, but the quiet kind that lives under your skin when you realize how much got taken and how little anyone can do to give it back. Sometimes I don’t even recognize myself, and that messes with me more than I want to admit. It’s not that I want to be who I was forever. It’s that I want my reflection to feel like home, and sometimes it doesn’t.
But I want to say this carefully, because I don’t want to take anything away from God. Any good in my life, any strength, any endurance, any moment I’ve shown up for my kids or my marriage when I felt like I had nothing left — that didn’t come from me being tough enough. All good things come from God. If I’m still here, it’s because God carried me, not in a tidy, inspirational way that makes suffering feel pretty, but in the actual way, breath by breath, appointment by appointment, night by night. In seasons where my faith felt strong and seasons where it felt like all I could do was whisper, please help me. God has been faithful in a life that has been anything but predictable, and if there is anything beautiful in this story at all, it’s Him, not me.
So when I look back at those photos, and when I look in the mirror now, I’m trying to let it be honest without letting it be cruel. I’m trying to stop treating the evidence of survival like a flaw and am trying to hold both truths. I can grieve what changed and also acknowledge that I survived because God held me. It’s possible to hate what illness has stolen from me and still believe God is good. I can admit I feel tired, worn down, and even a little lost inside my timeline, and I can still pray for restoration without pretending I’m fine. I’m not chasing the old “normal” anymore. I don’t even know if normal exists. I’m just asking God to meet me here, in this version of life, in this body that struggles with stairs, in this tired mom reflection, in this marriage that has carried more than we ever expected, and to keep giving us what we need for the next step.
And maybe that’s what this has become, at least for now. Not a triumphant comeback. Not a neat before and after. Just steps. One step, one day, one prayer at a time. God, help me take the next step. Literally. And then the next.
#MomWithATube
