Loyalty

Not only have we been faithfull to each other, the length of our marriage, we have also remained loyal. Right now it may seem that I am the loyal one, since my wife is ill and needs me to be dedicated to her well-being. I have been and will be.

She, for her part, would be just as loyal when I would be in dire straits - and in fact she has been. Lara was the one who hadn't trusted my cardiac health for some time when we were just back from our posting in Cairo. One day she coaxed me into a doctor's office in the Hague Westeinde Ziekenhuis, next to the apartment where we lived temporarily. After an ECG turned up nothing, Lara demanded I be subjected to a bicycle stress test. The doctor dismissed her as hysterical. No doctor in Holland would refer him to a stress test on the basis of an ECG like this! "This is not Geneva or the USA!"

A year and a half later, in 2002, when posted in Brussels, she surreptiously connived with my driver, Joao, and my secretary, Edith, and drove me to the hospital in Aalst for a stress test. I happened to have landed in one of the top five cardiac centers in the world. The test lead to a next one and within two weeks I was on the operating table to bypass an 80 percent blockage in my main cardiac artery. One little blood clot and I would have been dead. Hugo Vanermen, a leading thoracic surgeon, put in five bypasses to be on the safe side. I had picked him especially, since he had successfully operated on King Albert the year before! He would not be about to lose the Dutch Ambassador under his hands, I figured. And he didn't. (We have become friends since then.)

Without Lara's insistence I would now be speaking from the grave. She stuck as close to me as posible during the five hour plus operation. As I was wheeled in, she only let go of my hand when the swinging doors swallowed me whole. When I woke up in the recovery room, I found that my right hand was being held by both of hers. She came to visit twice a day during the days that followed until I was released after ten days, while keeping family and friends informed and managing their respective visits. She would hover over me during my months of recovery.

I am told that many a husband "would have walked" when faced with what Lara and I are currently going through together. Lara nor I can relate to that in the slightest. We are in it for the whole Spiel. Both ways.