Woman Caught Husband Cheating While Bedridden With Brain Inflammation

When most people trade wedding vows, they make a pledge to "have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until parted by death." This means that if one of the parties becomes sick, their significant other promises to stand by their side. However, this isn't always the case. In a new essay that has gone viral, one woman shares her story of how she got sick with severe inflammation, and instead of taking care of her, her husband cheated.

Meghan Beaudry, 36, a writer from Texas, became incredibly ill just two years after getting married. She developed aphasia brought on by the autoimmune disease Lupus, leaving her "bedridden" for months and "barely" able to "remember who she was."

"Unable to walk, think normally, and remember much of my past, I lay in bed all day trying to survive,'" she wrote about her illness in an essay for Insider.

"Over the next seven months, I tried to show [my husband that] I was still the woman he married, even when I could barely remember who I was myself," she continued. 

Meghan wrote that she once caught her husband "sitting beside her hospital bed" with "his head bowed and his shoulders slumped in grief."

The condition "obliterated her ability to understand time, her short-term and long-term memory, and her ability to think like an adult," she wrote. After being bedridden for seven months, it took a year-and-a-half to recover fully. But as she got better her marriage fell apart. 

"It never occurred to me that while I'd return to being the person I'd always been, my husband would not," she wrote. Instead of celebrating with her he would "erupt into fits of anger" and "scream at her" while she laid on the couch "still too weak to run away from him."

She then learned he was cheating on her, omitting her husband's name and the name of the woman he had an affair with. She says she left him as soon as she "grew healthy enough to live on her own."

"The first week I spent living away from him in my own place was one of the most peaceful weeks of my life," she wrote. "That's when I knew ending my marriage had been the right decision."

Her ex "didn't ask for his engagement ring back" and it's still "her favorite piece of jewelry and one of her most prized possessions" even now, eight years after they split up. "Surviving both a disease and a bad marriage is gritty and messy. But my ring reminds me that survival can also be beautiful."

"If I hadn't survived both my illness and a dangerous marriage, I wouldn't be the strong person I am today," she said. "My engagement ring is a reminder of who I am as a person and what I've lived through. Nine years after my recovery, I believe in clinging to joy whenever I can and treasuring those memories because none of us ever know when life might take them from us."