This archive report was first published on 12 October 2019.
When a 33-year-old Australian man was given a terminal diagnosis of stage 2 emphysema, his wife made the difficult decision to leave him. The couple had a two-year-old son, and the wife felt that her child deserved better than to grow up watching her husband deteriorate in front of him.
According to a blog post on Mamamia, the wife had been the one to encourage her husband to visit the doctor after he coughed up blood. However, when they received the diagnosis, the husband seemed to shrug it off, joking that he might as well continue smoking if it was the end.
The wife was horrified by her husband's lack of concern for his health and his impact on their child. She wrote, 'I was too forgiving. I was foolish. I discovered just how much, when the doctor told us what was wrong.'
With the doctor's warning that her husband would go through all four stages of emphysema quickly due to his smoking history, the wife knew she had to act. She said, 'As a mother, I knew in that moment I had to save my son. I was not going to have him growing up, watching me nurse his dad – who chose not to do a goddamn thing to help himself – deteriorating in front of him.'
She left her husband a few months later, after more arguments, but she has no regrets about her decision. She wrote, 'Call me a selfish bh, but I had no intention of looking after a man who didn’t care enough about us to even occasionally wake up early for his son, let alone quit smoking so he could be around longer.'
