The Beginning…The Diagnosis and the Cheating Ex

Lots of people have been asking about some snippets of info I’ve been slowly revealing about me, my life, my past, my Miracle Baby and the road to that Miracle. Since I tend to be wordy when it comes to writing out my thoughts, I thought I would do a series of posts to start at the beginning and work my way up to where I am today.

I figure Sundays would be a good day to do the ‘series posts’, since it’s a great day of reflection…at least for me! 😉 That way it won’t be a tedious read for all you wonderful readers and followers…and give you something to (hopefully) look forward to each week. 😉 Fair warning, for some people there might be some TMI (Too Much Information), and will most likely be more of a ‘serious tone’ compared to my ‘regular’ posts…I’ll try to keep it ‘light’, but read at your own risk! 😉

I was born at a very early age…well, I suppose I don’t have to backtrack that far! So I suppose the current journey really started when I was 26 and had been married to my first husband only 6 months when I was diagnosed with Severe Dysplasia – abnormal cells that if left unattended would morph into Cervical Cancer. My doctor was confident that we caught this early enough, so she scheduled me for a procedure to ‘freeze’ the bad cells to remove them.

On my follow up appointment, she was concerned that the ‘bad cells’ had advanced even further, showing signs of being very aggressive. She scheduled me for laser surgery to remove those pesky bad cells. After my recovery from that surgery, I went in for my follow up appointment. My doctor had more bad news for me – she apparently laser’d ‘beyond the margins’ of where the bad cells were present, just to make sure she got them all. But the bad cells went beyond the margin, which meant she didn’t get them all, and we had to schedule yet another surgery to remove the fast-moving, now cancerous, ‘bad cells’.

Unfortunately, with the information we have today about Cervical Cancer, people are being narrow minded about its cause – as in, those that are being diagnosed with it are sexually active, or active with multiple partners. Because of that misnomer, people are judgmental towards the unfortunate women that end up with Cervical Cancer. I was not a promiscuous person, I didn’t have multiple sexual partners before getting married at 26, I didn’t even get my first kiss until I was 19…by choice, not by circumstances. 😉

Six months after I got married I was diagnosed with this oddity. I was told that I was one the 2% of women that would contract this, and it could show up in any of my reproductive organs if they didn’t act fast. I was told after the surgeries that I would not be able to get pregnant ‘normally’, and that I would have to be monitored every 6 months to make sure it didn’t come back randomly in any of my reproductive organs, or opt for a hysterectomy at that young age if I chose not to have babies of my own. Of course I wanted to keep my options open, even if that meant the only way to have a baby would be IVF and be subject to ‘bed-rest’ the final 6 months of pregnancy because of the risk involved with my now ‘incompetent cervix’.

Turns out my ex-husband was ‘turned off’ by the fact that I would potentially not be able to give him children, and he turned to a woman at his work that ‘comforted’ him – she was married with a child herself, and she ultimately left her husband, got a condo, then kept bugging my husband to move in with her…three months later, I came home from work and he had cleared out all his belongings (and some of mine) and left me a note saying he needed to ‘find himself’. Huh. Interesting.

I didn’t see that coming, especially since everyone around us had recently been marveling at how we still acted like newlyweds even as we approached our 3rd anniversary. Even I still had those rose-colored glasses still attached firmly to my face. Then reality sunk in – I started to realize that all those ‘late night meetings’ weren’t really what he said they were. He had been cheating on me for at least 6 months, possibly longer.

During the stress of him walking out on me in the cowardly way that he did, I discovered I was pregnant. When I informed my husband of that, he mocked me, and said that based on what the doctor told us, I couldn’t be pregnant – and if I was, he would not be there for “the child”. Who was this Loser I was married to?

Then the cattiness of ‘the other woman’ really came out – she convinced my hubby to get a restraining order against me, so I couldn’t show up at his work (since she worked there, too, and didn’t like it when I came by to have lunch with my best friend – who also worked there) because my hubby seemed to be happy to see me…maybe he was having second thoughts, but if he was, she made sure they didn’t last long at all. She coached my ex and had him have me served with divorce papers at my place of employment just the day before our 3rd anniversary, and attempted to get the divorce finalized on my 30th birthday, but fell 2 days short of that.

The stress really got to me, and during all the trauma, I miscarried the baby. When I called to let my hubby know, he was cold as ice, and thought I was trying to create some drama to get us back together. Maybe subconsciously I was hoping it would snap him out of the tentacles of the poisonous black widow whose sticky web he had gotten caught up in, but part of me knew that he was lost forever.

He did get his in the end, though, because he ended up marrying that woman a month after our divorce was finalized, but then she left him for someone else just 4 months after they were married…what goes ’round does indeed come ’round!

Of course I was mortified that I was now divorced…you know, the ‘D’ word…but luckily my friends and family rallied around me during this stressful time, they were there when I needed a shoulder to cry on, and they were there to help me pick up the pieces. One friend even set me up a short time later with her former college roommate…but that whole scenario will be covered in next week’s segment. Come back next week to read Segment 2 – Rebound Relationship, Abusive Hubby #2.