Care Giving and the state of things

I have now spent almost 28 years as a care giver. I didn’t train for it, and I am likely not anywhere near the best, but in our case, I was the only so I have had to learn a whole bunch of things about caring for someone who is seriously ill.
It is one thing to train to be a nurse, aide, or even doctor, and that was one of the potential career options expected for the women in our family, or education. We had a lot of teachers, principles, professors, nurses, and some crossover nursing instructors. I never wanted to fit in there anywhere. So here I am, taking care of a sick person.
Life.
I can honestly say that we have had a learn- as- you-go experience. Not just my care giving, but the whole chronic illness thing. First, Himself came down with pneumonia that wouldn’t go away, then he was hospitalized and tested for 3 weeks and we found out there were a lot of things he didn’t have, but no definitive name for what he did have. After a series of treatments that didn’t work we left the care he was under, against their advice, and moved 1,300 miles back to the Seattle area where we had family support. (Since our oldest was not quite two at the time, I needed all the family I could get).
Several months and a couple of crisis later he was hospitalized again and went through another bunch of tests with the same results. We still didn’t have a definitive diagnosis for whatever it was that was wrong with him. At that point he seemed to resign himself to dying and spent his days drinking coffee or Pepsi and smoking Pall Malls on our porch.
A serious crisis, a collapsed lung, and a several day hospitalization led us to a doctor with conviction. He explained that the chances weren’t good, but might be increased significantly by surgery. By this time Himself was a stick figure, about 60 pounds underweight and I didn’t think he could withstand the surgery itself, but he went for it.
At that time, 1983, he smoked about a pack a day, sometimes more, and no doctor would tell him definitively to quit. He was even allowed to smoke on the gurney on his way to the operating room.
(One would think that after having ½ of one lung removed, smoking would go away, but no, he smoked for five more years.)
After surgery, tissue samples were sent all over the country for analysis and diagnosis, and once again we found a whole list of things he didn’t have. It was almost 10 years later when we finally were given a diagnosis of pulmonary fibrosis. And it wasn’t until last summer, during one of his two hospitalizations for pneumonia, that I learned form a pulmonologist that it was likely that long because the diagnosis hadn’t been developed yet. Himself, being who he is has a relatively rare version.
Over the years we have had relatively calm periods and acute stages of his illness, and of course he is more suseptable to "the thing that's going around". He was able to help by getting kids to school and fixing dinner 3 or 4 times a week, and some years when he was well enough to work a little bit.

Over the years he has developed a secondary immune system illness, caused by being ill for so long, as well as congestive heart failure five years ago, from which he recovered fully, and a quadruple by-pass a year and half ago, which they weren't going to do because of his history but he has come back so far that all of his docs are amazed, - it's not 100% yet, but he is determined to get all of his mobility and strength back.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, except to say that from all of this I have learned a couple of very important things: everyone needs an advocate when they are ill, someone to listen to the medical people and translate as necessary, and stand up and question when that is necessary also; and, will, the power of the mind, positive thoughts, whatever you want to call it, is the most important thing in some one's recovery.