The Wrong Sister

I have a story to tell, and today is the day I decided to tell it. I don’t know why; I guess I just felt compelled to get the story out. Maybe seeing it in print will make it easier for me to believe it all actually happened. It’s the story of how I ultimately ended up marrying the wrong sister. It’s a story full of anger and fear as well as excitement and hope. There is lust and humor as well as grief and a fierce desperation for happiness and survival. My name is Shaylin Aria Howard, and it’s now late 2016. In early 2013, I had a scary reaction to my thyroid medication. It wasn’t the medication itself that was the issue, but rather the wrong dose in conjunction with going through perimenopause and having a rapid heart rate. The experience caused so much anxiety that my PCP recommended I see a counselor to help me manage it better, because I was experiencing panic attacks. I would call my husband, Henry, at work, completely freaked out and panicking. I felt horrible both physically and emotionally, and I knew I had to do something before I totally went out of my mind. I first saw a counselor named Dana with a different medical group, but I didn’t really learn anything from her or find her very helpful. I just liked the way she dressed. She dressed young and colorful, even though she, too, was older. Because that group wasn’t very helpful overall, I switched to a different medical group, and I found the doctors there to be a lot more informative and helpful in regulating my medication dosage so it wasn’t wreaking havoc on my life. The plan was to see Stacey only once, just to make my doctor happy. I still believed back in those days that the anxiety was mostly over and that I would eventually get a handle on it soon enough, either way. Besides, I just didn’t see how telling one more person about what happened could possibly help me. Begrudgingly, I went to see her with Henry and told her my story. I was impressed with her from day one. She not only listened to me really well and didn’t interrupt me constantly as Dana had, but she also gave me some very helpful information and tools to help calm me down when I was feeling anxious. I learned emotional tapping, a form of Chinese medicine, and then she eventually did EMDR therapy with me. That one session turned into eight, and in the end, I was seeing her without Henry present. He waited for me in the waiting room while he played games on his phone because he had to drive me due to my driving phobia. In time, I eventually realized that I had come to have a bit of a crush on Stacey. It wasn’t so much that she was attractive as that she simply had an addictive personality. She had such a calm, soothing way about her. Like me, Stacey was short. But unlike me at the time, she was thin. I was surprised to learn that she, too, had a low thyroid, but she obviously came from skinny genetics, whereas I did not. So she may not have been a beauty queen, and she was probably considered pretty average by most people’s standards, but I felt a strong sense of comfort looking into her warm brown eyes and sensual smile. She did have a sexy ass and nose, though. I couldn’t deny that much. In her medical photo, her side-parted, shoulder-length dark hair with auburn highlights was curly, but she usually wore it straight. It wasn’t how much I came to admire her that surprised me. The real surprise was that it was mutual. It wasn’t anything she said, but the way she said it that told me this. At first, I tried to tell myself I was reading her wrong, but it was there—the signs, that is. The way she spoke, her body language, etc. We parted at the end of our eighth session, with me giving her my contact info and her telling me I could call her or see her anytime. By the time six months or so had passed, I was hoping that she would be the one to make the first move and reach out to me, though I did plan to take the honors if she didn’t. As fate would have it, my wish came true. Only it wasn’t at all in the way I had envisioned it. As they say, however, life isn’t usually what we plan. Nobody plans to lose their husband and their home in an earthquake.