How Did Your Cheater Risk Your Health?
The Friday Challenge topic is cheaters as health risks. In that “quest for aliveness” and “exuberant defiance” (affairs) what gambles did they take with your health?
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Earlier this week I had the honor of interviewing Eileen McGill Fox for the Tell Me How You’re Mighty podcast. She’s the mightiest of the mighty. Eileen could be any chump here.
For over 30 years her husband had a double life.
Cheating with men, mostly seggs workers. She had no idea. He appeared to be a committed family man and they had four children together. Thanks to his wandering dick, Eileen contracted a virulent strain of HPV16, which resulted in cervical, vulvar, and anal cancer for her. (Not him.)
She’s still fighting the cancer. And him — they’re still finalizing a divorce. Eileen’s has bravely gone public with her story because she got an affidavit from him about his double life. Her cancer doctors also offered their medical opinion that this exposure came solely from him. (HPV can be dormant in your system for years, yes, but apparently not 30 years and not this virulent a strain.)
Next to death, the cure sounds worse than the disease. Eileen goes into some very personal detail about what this has done to her body. (Which I cannot share here because of AI censor bots.) But she’s talking anyway:
I knew two things when I found this out. One, that I would not be quiet about it. And two, that I was not to blame for any of his behaviors.
Eileen MCGill Fox
She’s shouting it from the rooftops:
Infidelity is domestic abuse.
Eileen does not shy away from this message. She pulls zero punches. She told me her husband could’ve shot her and done less damage to her body than what she’s been through. His selfish decisions permeate her life every single day.
And yet no one talks about how cheaters endanger our health when they make unilateral risks to have affairs. No, instead the narrative is focused on cheaters “unmet needs” or romanticized by nitwits like Esther Perel who calls infidelity “exuberant acts of defiance” and “quests for aliveness.”
You know what’s exuberant? HPV16. You know who’s nearly un-alive? Eileen Mc Gill Fox.
But she’s fighting back by helping others.
The fact that I know her story at all, or you do now, is because Eileen threw herself into raising awareness about cancer and HPV.
Because she was a health advocate, she allowed herself to be FILMED getting a butt screening by the Tampa Bay Times. Literally laying it all bare. And she didn’t shy away telling reporters about how she got this cancer.
The Tampa Bay story then got picked up by People magazine “Woman Diagnosed with Vulvar, Cervical and Anal Cancer After Learning Her Husband of 30 Years Had Cheated on Her.”
As far as I know, this is the FIRST time a major media headline has ever linked an STI outcome for a chump to a cheater. Kudos to that editor at People magazine for framing it this way!
Yes, Eileen framed it that way first, but how often are these stories erased or glossed over? It’s a bit hard to both-siderism HPV16.
But Eileen isn’t alone. She’s just unique and brave for talking about it. So, today’s Friday Challenge question is:
How did your cheater risk your health?
Meanwhile, Eileen would like us to raise awareness about these STIs and get vaccinated. So…
What you need to know about the HPV vaccine:
- It prevents 90 percent of all genital cancers.
- It’s effective even if you’ve already had HPV.
- Insanely, most insurance does not cover it for women over 45. (EXPLAIN THIS TO ME, PATRIARCHY!)
- HPV is not part of STI screenings. For women, to be screened, you need a Pap smear. So, please, get your Pap smears!
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Well, for starters, I had a full hysterectomy last fall due to something my cheater ex gave me. Then there are the years of depression and sadness. And top it with the ongoing triggers and panic attacks when he involves our adult children in his dirty life. I left him years ago, but the weight lingers in my heart and soul.
This is an interesting one. While I don’t think that Ex-Mrs LFTT risked my physical health (she had been actively withholding intimacy for over a year before her infidelity was exposed) during her affair, there were significant other health-related impacts that arose from her actions.
Her lies, manipulation, gaslighting and generally entitled and unpleasant behaviour during the run up to her infidelity being discovered, as well as afterwards had a massive and negative effect on my mental health, as well as our three childrens’ (they were 11, 16 and 18 at the time) mental health. All four of us have required therapy at some point to help us come to terms with what she did to us, and two of the children started self-h*rming and one (thankfully unsuccessfully) attempted sui*ide. Thankfully all four of us are in a better place now, but it has taken a lot of work to get there … and it’s not thanks to Ex-Mrs LFTT.
I guess the advice that I would give to any Chump is that of course they should think about the physical risks that your Cheater has exposed you too … but that no Chump (or child of a Chump) should take the mental health angle for granted.
LFTT
100%. I am in exactly the same situation and the last three years with the cheater were hell – verbal abuse, gaslighting, extreme anxiety – I just did not know what was causing all of these and I thought I WAS THE PROBLEM. Thankfully it is all over
My story is relatively tame compared to this poor woman’s horrible cancer.
When I first found out about FW cheating, I went and sobbed to my doctor and got ALL the tests for anything they can test. Everything was negative except – HBV! Which was a BIG surprise because I was vaccinated (with follow-up titer to prove success) for that 15+ years ago during my lab career working with bloodborne pathogens. This led to a whole goose chase of retesting with multiple labs and a visit to an infectious disease specialist to find out my HBV vaccine had waned and I was no longer immune, but apparently not infected either. Errant lab result? We don’t know. It was negative in 3 other labs. But this was not a fun journey, and at least it broke the spell of the hysterical bonding.
I will, for the rest of my life, feel extreme stress leading up to my yearly OBGYN appointment knowing that HPV could pop up at any time. My insurance only covers testing for that every 3 years, and I insist on yearly, so I will be paying a minimum of $100 every 2/3 visits for the rest of my life as well. Thanks, FW.
And don’t forget the indirect risks to health – stress, loss of insurance, loss of rides home from outpatient procedures, etc.
He gave me four STDs. But he never admitted to it, and tried to convince me that I got them from a toilet seat or maybe I was the cheater. I had to get a hysterectomy. In the end it was breathtaking how little he cared.
My FW insisted I’d had it since before I’d married him, which was decades in the past.
There’s an article published here how Schmoopie virtue signaled about her cervical cancer from hpv. I’m also in the hysterectomy club due to hpv and my body’s inability to effectively fight it after being through separate cancer treatments. I had never tested positive for it until the divorce. While I can’t prove it, the timing and my outcome are less than reassuring of my ex’s innocence of this harm.
My ex was very covert until the discard/end. While I was pregnant with our second child, after a devastating miscarriage, he tried to serve me raw poultry that had been prepared to look cooked. He left raw pork drippings across countertops and blew up when called out on it. During my first pregnancy he had behaved as doting, careful, a partner. During the last one he refused to clean the cat litter, would dump messes anywhere I had cleaned, and shut doors on me if I was using any harsh chemicals. Those are just a few examples of the physical harm or attempts to harm I experienced while pregnant. In texts to schmoopie, there is word salad evidence that it was part of his calculations in leaving.
Looking back, I recognize many more harmful incidents cloaked as caring from earlier in the marriage. Trying to serve me red colored broth before a surgery, grabbing me and swinging me to the side repeatedly after a spinal health issue had been found, sleep deprivation, speaking over me at my doctor and attempting to get me to take frequent painkillers, adding known migraine triggers to my foods, the list goes on. The kids were never immune to it, either. I’m not even delving into the financial, stress, emotional, and mental abuses despite how they also affect health.
Not very exuberant of me, I know.
If he had managed to give you toxoplasmosis from the cat litter, you might have had a badly damaged infant or even a stillbirth. What an evil person!
I appreciate the cheating-is-abuse message because it’s been something that’s taken me a long time to understand. My ego refused to acknowledge that I was in an ‘abusive’ relationship. Lies don’t have the same visual impact as black eyes.
My ex was diagnosed with HPV positive oral cancer within a year of our separation. The ‘it can lie dormant for years’ line really irks me because I don’t think it was a coincidence that he was diagnosed with HPV cancer after adding more partners to his line-up. The multiple partners as a risk factor’ message needs to be amplified. No surprise that he got it after becoming a human Petri dish.
That being said, Eileen having the cancer is so wrong. Her smile and attitude . . . she is one amazing woman.
I cannot remember the specific number attached to my HPV diagnosis, but it was so virulent that I required surgery within 6 months, and then was gifted with 6 month check ups for the rest of my life. That’s bad, but what bothers me most is the fact that schmoopie had absolutely terrible skin. I thought it was acne. It was not. FW seems to have passed on an additional HPV, one that causes tiny, rough warts on most of my skin surfaces. I always prided myself on my lovely complexion. That went right out the door with FW, as a result of his actions. I absolutely hate these tiny constant reminders of his skin against her body. I fight daily to keep my skin from looking like schmoopie’s. There aren’t bad enough curse words to express my loathing for the pair of them.
It’s now known that domestic violence and coercive control and the stress and very special depth of despair they cause can severely compromise the immune system and increase risks of not only infectious illness but cancer and autoimmunity.
That may be how some of these creeps manage to pass on serious or deadly infections yet not succumb themselves– because (according to more research findings) bullying apparently has the perk of boosting bullies’ immune systems and lowering inflammation while doing the exact reverse in victims.
Turns out there’s actually a method to the madness: since “status” in the animal world is really a relative thing (having more of it than someone else) and therefore largely subjective or illusory, this means that engineering it so that someone has less status than you and you have comparatively more than them– as artificial as it is– still has a real physiological perks and consequences. But I imagine this only works for individuals who are basically pretty unreflective and “animalistic” to start with in the sense that they can derive pleasure from sadistic or predatory acts and have an on/off switch for empathy. Otherwise the guilt of torturing intimate partners would simply cause more stress for normal people.