What do you expect your therapist to say? Your therapist knows your situation better than I do, but even I can say the following: It will work out. One way or another, it will, indeed, work out. When you rule out all the things that, to your mind, are impossible for you to do - like you moving out - then what you are left with is what you will do. And that's the course of action that will get you from now to six months from now. Then, at that time, you will still have options. You may not like the options, but you will study them and select what seems least unacceptable to you. That's how life goes.

If your range of options seem unacceptably narrow to you, you are the one who narrowed them - by your past choices and by your own code of what is acceptable to your conscience. Even if you had moved in with a man in perfect health, there would have been a chance of that man being paralyzed in a car wreck tomorrow. That can happen to anyone on any tomorrow. (It coud happen to you next week.) You're intelligent enough to have known this, and you did know it. So it's a bit disingenuous to protest, now, that you never signed on for what you are facing. You hooked your cart to his star when you sold your home furnishings and moved in to his house. No, you didn't, at that time, marry him. So what? You might as well have, in terms of how entangled your life is, now, with his. So this pondering of to marry, verses not to marry, is kind of neither here nor there. You already feel stuck, living with him just as you are. But you already made the decision to be thus entangled back when you moved in. You already decided that the benefits merited the risk. If that now seems to have been a decision you regret, then regret it. But know that neither fate, nor society, nor this man forced you into where you are. You are where you put yourself. You moved in with him because you thought it would be good for you. If it, now, seems you miscalculated . . . well, join the club. That's what humans do. That's why things like divorce were invented.

So, if you've decided that leaving, now, is impossible . . . then that means you stay. You stay and deal. You still have the option of leaving down the road. You still have the option of canceling the wedding. Entertaining those options is your right, and it doesn't matter how you will look . . . to others, or to yourself. It's okay to decide you bit off more than you could chew. It's empowering to know that you bit it off, and you can spit it out. Doing so may force you to see yourself in a new light that doesn't feel flattering. That won't kill you. We are who we are. We need what we need, and we can only do what we are reasonably able to do. Staying with this man for another six months doesn't mean you have to stay there for the next twenty years. Leave now, or leave next year . . . or don't leave at all. You have options, and you are entitled to look at all of them. You have a right to unmake the decision to be in his house. If you feel that cohabiting was meant to leave you the option of leaving, then tell him that . . . that you expect to eventually leave.

Practically speaking, the two of you are people of some means. You are not an uneducated, unemployed mother, living with an abusive man and having no where to go but a shelter. You are employed. If you really want to leave, now, having sold your own furnishings is not the end of the world. There are furnished rooms that one can rent. If you stay, you don't have to do all his care 24/7. Help can be hired. Maybe he will need to take a loan or a second mortgage to pay an attendent to provide some care. Start looking around. Under the table, immigrant help can be a lot more reasonable than going through a home care agency, which is terribly expensive. Some of this is his problem to figure out. He and you need to not waste time, if surgery is imminent.