Not Even to Save Your Life
I had a very long and awful relationship with an ex. I had wanted to leave for years, but he would threaten to end himself and I would end up staying.
I, finally, got the courage to walk away when I was diagnosed with several benign liver tumors and was told by the doctor that it was very important with this type of tumor to immediately and permanently stop taking hormonal birth control.
I researched it on my own and confirmed the single most important thing I could do to avoid further complications was to stop taking hormonal birth control for good. I told my then-husband about the appointment and he said, oh so calmly, “Well that’s going to be a problem.”
I was like, “What do you mean? I’ll go to the gynecologist as soon as I can get an appointment and we can just use condoms until then.”
Nope. According to him, condoms were unacceptable because we were married. And not being intimate until I got to go to the gynecologist was also unacceptable.
And that’s not even the part that really made my blood run cold. That was when he suggested that I should continue to take birth control as normal and just not tell the doctor. “He’ll never know,” he said.
Then he went on to suggest that maybe I could go on and off birth control so I’d be off of it before any follow-up appointments with this doctor, to ensure that he’d never know.
I was totally stunned and I just looked at him and said, “You understand this could kill me? This isn’t about placating a doctor; this is about my life.”
He just shrugged and said he wasn’t using condoms and I needed to “figure it out.” I did figure it out. I left him more than a decade ago and have never been happier.