A woman has revealed that she left her husband while he was suffering from testicular cancer and says she has no regrets ‘at all.’
Yana Fry, who works as a life coach in Singapore, is originally from St Petersburg, Russia. She got married at the age of 22 and her husband was 15 years older than her. A few months after their marriage, Yana’s husband was diagnosed with testicular cancer.
According to Fry, she stayed with her husband for five years after his cancer diagnosis. However, she couldn’t take it anymore and ended her marriage with him.
Looking back now, Yana wishes she hadn’t rushed into marriage at such a young age.
“I rushed into that marriage. I don’t think women should marry before 30. We have no idea who we are, and we don’t know what is a good partner for us,” she said.
She said it wasn’t just his cancer that affected their relationship; her ex-husband was always ‘drowned in self-pity’ even before he was diagnosed with the deadly disease.
The now-40-year-old life coach explained that after his diagnosis, things got worse.
“People react in one of two ways to critical illnesses, I’ve seen it over and over,” she said. “The first type was how my husband unfortunately was – the people who drown in self-pity. The second type of people are those who are instead concerned with everyone around them.”
The Russian native added that she got married with the desire to have children, but her former husband’s illness made that impossible.
“We had a great dating experience. I definitely thought, ‘I’m marrying for life, and I want babies right away,’” she said. “Then my husband, who was 37, got diagnosed with testicular cancer when I was 22.”
“The chances of people dying from testicular cancer are not as high as other types of cancer. Usually, doctors tell you that unless there’s some kind of big exception, you’re gonna you’re going to survive for quite a while,” she continued.
“But I was worried that we wouldn’t be able to have children.”
Yana, who met her husband a year before their marriage, said he got transferred to New York after their wedding, and she had to move there with him, which made her live in total isolation as she had no friends in NYC and didn’t know how to deal with her depression after the diagnosis.
“We got married in Switzerland – my husband was Swiss – and then we moved to New York. He was working for a company that transferred him there,” she said.
“I was learning English at the time. I had no friends, no relatives. I was in total isolation with no support system. We couldn’t really think about our future. How can you plan for your future as a newly-married couple when you’re struggling with something like cancer?”
She added that not many people were aware of mental health issues back then, and nobody offered her any help.
“We saw different kinds of doctors. Not a single person ever offered me help. They never asked, ‘Do you need a support system? Are you part of a counselling group?”
She explained, “I was hoping for the best with my ex-husband’s cancer, but then years went by, and I started to lose hope. It was five years with all the treatments, and it started to change the dynamics within our relationship.”
“It wasn’t until that fifth year that I started to think about leaving.”
The life coach said she eventually took the plunge and ended her marriage after one of her friends committed suicide, and that incident made her ‘state of mind’ even worse.
“It was my first funeral, and it was very shocking. In my mind at the time, suicide became an option, even though I had never considered that before. I was in such a bad state,” she explained.
“It was very clear to me that if I didn’t save myself, I was probably going to die.”
And then, she divorced her husband to save herself and her well-being.
“People sent me horrible messages. I don’t want to call it hatred, but it was close to that. People were in pain, and they wanted to blame someone. His family were so disappointed,” she said.
She said her former in-laws were so mad at her for leaving her husband that they didn’t even inform her about his passing, even though he remarried after their divorce.
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