[Patient _man]

Thank you Velmet. You’ve been so helpful. And thank you gvalls.

[Patient _man]

Thanks for responses.  I appreciate being heard by someone outside of my parents.
They both always liked my wife.  At that the same time they also know several families whose finances got ruined by one spouse’s gambling.

“But while I’m alive I want not to be lonely, want calmness. I also want my money to go to someone with health and a future but not to the casino”.  I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s 10 years ago, one year after marriage. My first finger twitch, was 14 years ago.  I have felt guilt over marrying,  I didn’t know I had PD when we married.  I was determined to work as long as I could and pay off the house so when I’m gone she would have it to choose to keep or sell and return to her country.  I am disabled by PD much of the time now.  So I can’t vacation or go out like I used to.  Few expenses.  So I feel that someone healthy with a possible good future would benefit more.  If I live with her again, I’m able to help her financially, but I don’t want to fund the casinos through her. 
 
If in a relationship, I don’t want to be left alone in the house like she did.  Currently I stay with my parents (and I’m 52).  They are in and out of the house throughout the day but I have social times with them, usually watching tv and talking which is nice and better than being lonely while my wife was at the casino.

I actually offered to pay for counseling for her gambling in summer 2019, she didn’t want it.  She said she would stop on her own.  At that point I was staying at my parents’ home.  I had become good at reading her gambling habit in person.  At that point I only had emails to go by.  I did feel through timing of emails (she didn’t have a cell phone at that point) and what she wrote that she was still going.  Eventually I did long drives to check.  Her car was in the casino parking lot.  I mentioned, again she said she would stop gambling in her own way.  Again I found the car there.  She said she would stop.  I said that at this point she should self ban herself and join GA. She self-banned and sent me a copy of the paperwork.  But there is another casino about 40 minutes away and she chose not to self-ban from that one because she said she never goes there.  It is a bigger casino with a much more complicated parking lot that makes checking difficult.  She refused GA.

I realize that I was enabling her for a while.  Innocently, I thought she was doing breakeven or just a little less than that.  It was only in 2018 that I began reading up on gambling addiction because I saw that having a full-time job didn’t seem to reduce her hours per week at the casino.  I realized I had helped things get to this point (enabling).

My mom can sometimes say things in such a way that there is another meaning behind what she says.  My wife experienced it sometimes.  Sometimes with others present the conversation went to work related things, leaving my unworking wife out of the conversation.  This got to her.  She is very sensitive to what is or what she perseves to be passive aggressive messages.  Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.  She finally took a job just when I went onto disability.  She absolutely hated it.  Was angry nearly every day she got home.  I stopped asking how her day was because this made her mood fouler, I started asking about the drive and other things.  I think she blamed my mother and my family for her job and feeling the need to work.  Work made her mood bad so she probably felt the need to de-stress at the casino.  This probably exhausted her more and the losses kept building up, and the blame likely went to my family, especially my mom, and to me.  This is my interpretation and I’ve asked exactly this but my wife won’t confirm or deny.  Since retirement my mom has volunteered and been runnning a charity gift shop for a local hospital.

By rage I mean she gets so angry, just standing there, muscles tensed, face bright red, angrily repeating things that bothered her over the years.  Not only repeating things that she said in the last rage but things she said 10 minutes earlier.  This could go on for hours, not always at full intensity.  Then things would calm a bit into more of an intense discussion, then any wrong thing said by me or her and she’d rage and ramble on about the same things again.  If I try to explain how she may be misinterpreting things then I’m not on her side.  If I try to just calm her then I’m not listening.  If I try saying nothing, she keeps herself going working her anger up by herself.  Irrational things, twisting things that were spoken to her in the past or things I say in an all out honest effort to calm her.  I totally don’t know her when this happens and can’t get through to the person I loved so much.  Sometimes I felt she raged on purpose as an excuse to go to the casino, now I also think it also was pressure from losses.  But I’m guessing, because in her current calm state she won’t discuss.  In September 2018, my parents and brother showed up to try an intervention, that day became part of future anger topics.  As PD, Dyskinesia, and Dystonia got stronger it became hard for me to fix things.  Like in 2017 my parents came to fix the fence and porch.  My wife had actually made great effort and did a good job and I said so but we needed more help and tools.  Everything seemed fine but afterwards whenever she was upset at them (for no actual current reason) and if I mentioned that they were good to us and were trying to help as I got sicker and how they helped with the fence and porch, it was always taken as an insult to her work on the porch.  I was still working at that point, and PD as disabling me.  It bothered me that I was becoming useless.  My parents did things like that, drove an hour, brought food, fixed things, then left.  And somehow this started bothering her.  It was very infrequent.

There are many things that I like about my wife, she is the best friend of my life, I feel.  We did much traveling together.  We had mostly great years.  She did not adapt well once Parkinson’s progressed and began limiting me.  Her gambling addiction had already been in place by then.  I wish I had known more about gambling addiction at that point.

Now she struggles to find work.  She’s calm, sad, worried about her future, swears she’s learned and wants to be a better person.  Parkinson’s has limited me, stage 3, I rarely go outside.  Except for advising her on jobs and gambling treatment, the only way I can help her is to risk living with her because I am on medical retirement pay and can support her if she doesn’t find a job.  I feel bad for her, she’s in good health.  I’m the one without much of a future, stage 4 will be terrible and as far as I go with Parkinson’s.  But I also don’t want to go through that chaos again.

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