A man walked out on his wife in the hospital immediately after she was diagnosed with cancer and told she wouldn’t be able to have biological children.
The 33-year-old husband made the shocking admission on Reddit’s “Am I the A–hole” forum this week under the username fassaaai. He said he was on a business trip when his wife took herself to the hospital after enduring “searing pelvic pain.”
The Redditor said he cut his business trip short to join his wife in the hospital and once he got there the doctor said the ultrasound and CT scan showed she had ovarian cancer.
“My wife starts sobbing but at first I stay still because I don’t even know what to make of it,” the man wrote.
Then the doctor explained she would need a total hysterectomy.
“That news jolted me from my chair,” the man wrote. “Because the doctor was effectively telling me that she wouldn’t be able to have kids after this, and after years of work, I thought we’d finally have a family.”
The man wrote that he became angry not just because of the cancer, but also because, “I had begged her to have kids since we were 26, but she refused for her career.”
“And now instead of becoming a real family, I didn’t even know if she would remain the woman I married, whether the last picture of us together would be [the] last time I’d remember her looking beautiful, young, and carefree,” he continued. “Because the wife I [saw] in front of me was already a different person.”
At that moment, the Redditor said his wife told him they would “fight this” and adopt children instead.
“But I shook my head and turned to walk out the door,” he confessed. “I still had my suitcase in the car so I drove to a hotel because I didn’t know if my wife was going to end up being discharged or what. At the hotel I was at least able to get out of reactive mode, but I was still so disappointed that our dream of a family was over.”
At the hotel, he said his mother-in-law called and told him to “just stay there.” It was unclear from the post whether the man has seen his wife since her diagnosis or if they’re even still together.
In his Reddit post, the man defended himself, saying that even though he acted impulsively, the diagnosis “just sliced my life and my wife’s life wide open.”
“I wasn’t going to expel the cancer if I stayed that night but I did at least make myself aware of my situation,” he said. “And I feel I have a right to be angry that my hope of biological kids, the only kind I ever wanted, is rapidly fading away.”
Other Reddit users reacted to the post, saying that fassaaai had the wrong reaction.
“This is not about you or your feelings,” one person wrote. “No one preempts cancer. No woman should be forced to have children earlier than she’s ready to just to fit into someone else’s grand master plan. The fact that you don’t see her as the person you married when she is more than just an incubator and a baby making machine is deeply troubling.”
Someone else commented: “Sure, you’re allowed to mourn the loss of what could have been, but you don’t get to abandon your wife during the worst moment of her life and cry victim.”
