The day my husband was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, my life became a photograph, a distorted picture that I was forced to look at every day. An image that stayed the same, capturing a moment in time, a moment that changed everything.Seasons passed, birthdays and holidays, but the disease remained, hanging on a branch right in front of my face like a rotten piece of fruit I wanted to pick and throw away. My husband’s diagnosis became our life, overcrowding our marriage and squeezing everything else out.It’s important to realize that different personalities, age, and how one conducts their daily life play a major role in how one might handle a diagnosis such as this.In movies and books it’s often portrayed as a sort of renewal for the relationship, the spouses uniting as a strong force, preparing for battle. I quickly learned that this is a misconception.Reality had smacked me square in the face and the sting has been painful ever since, a sort of lingering anguish.This is my first memoir. My craft of choice is fiction romance. I have published fourteen novellas through several ebook companies.When my husband got sick, because of his personality and how he managed the other components in his life, his diagnosis only brought us closer for a short period of time, a sort of stunned desperation that had us clinging to one another, but then soon after, it tore us apart. As the leukemia corroded my husband’s bone marrow, it also poisoned our marriage.Because Mike wasn’t what the doctors referred to as symptomatic, I think that worked to his disadvantage, aiding him to never really accept the illness for what it was. His acknowledgement of the disease wouldn’t come until ten months later, and by then Mike’s prognosis and our marriage were drifting into dark territory.