You may find this shocking to believe that I once use to question if my ex-husband was poisoning me. I actually thought it was pretty crazy to think such a thing. I certainly did not think a normal person would even consider such a thing. I cannot tell you how many doctor’s I visited during those years of my marriage trying to figure out why I was so sick. I never could figure out what was wrong, no real medical explanation and I continued to get sicker. The symptoms started not long after giving birth to our daughter in 1999 and I began feeling sick later that year.
Dear Reader: If you can relate to what I am posting, please do not dismiss your symptoms as being ‘in your mind’ and consider your body may just be warning you of a present danger.
Post Update: It is strange I finally decide to post this and then I read this article: Tennessee woman accuses physician husband of poisoning coffee with barium. The story is about a women in Tennessee that says her husband was trying to poison her through her coffee, slowly and over time. It certainly makes me wonder how many people’s illnesses may be a result of a toxic marriage which can actually cause the same symptoms as true poison.
Real Physical Symptoms
Some of my physical symptoms included:
- Migraines
- Blurred Vision
- Light Sensitivity
- Heart Palpitations
- Stomach Problems
- Intestinal Problems
- Full-blown Anxiety (felt like someone was sitting on my chest at all times)
- Blood in my Stool (this was one red flag symptom the doctor dismissed)
When the initial symptoms started they were very faint. I almost felt this weird faint pulsing somewhere in my body. I could not quite identify where they were coming from.
Initially, I thought perhaps I had some cancer that they had not discovered yet. I also went through all the logical conclusions of food intolerance, reaction to sugar, checked for diabetes or hypo-hypoglycemia. During this time I started to have new symptoms that were probably anxiety over the symptoms.
“Crazy Making” & “Gaslighting”
I guess what really began puzzling me was my ex-husband at the time really did not seem to be concerned that I felt bad. It was almost as if he was glad that I was not feeling well. In fact, he often gave me a hard time and would tell me it is probably caffeine. So I stopped drinking diet cokes and avoided caffeine. He really made me feel like my symptoms were all in my head and I was some sort of hypochondriac. So many little things he would say would make me feel like I was just imagining these symptoms.
At this point the thought of poisoning had not crossed my mind yet. One mistake I made during this time was not getting a second opinion. I trusted my doctor.
When I first began seeing the doctor I told her about the blood I saw when I went to the bathroom. She dismissed it and said that was normal. That continued to happen throughout the year and she kept saying it was not anything to be concerned bout. So the doctors continued to do a series of tests to figure out what it wasn’t; ultra sounds, EKGs, giving me pills like Wellbutrin… I think the pills only masked my symptoms and prolonged the issue.
Towards the end of 2000 I had finally figured out that this was digestive related. The doctor tried to explain it away as Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). This conclusion sounded logical as I had most of those symptoms. However, when I read about it, one of the comments said that blood should never be present that indicated there may be another problem.
So I contacted my doctor and told her about what I had discovered. I told her I wanted a second opinion from a specialist. She told me, “Okay, but I don’t think they will tell you anything different than what I have told you.” Glad I ignored her and proceed with visiting the specialist.
So I went to see a Gastroenterology specialist. He said that seeing blood is never normal and had me in for a Colonoscopy four days later. Apparently I had a polyp in my colon that was the size of a plum in which they removed. The doctor said that was the largest polyp he had seen in someone so young. He said it was large enough to block my colon completely. It was also ulceric which was why I saw the blood and it was spasming which was the reason for the strange pulsing symptoms I had felt.
It took me about 7 months to completely recover after having this surgery. My body simply could not function the way it should during this entire situation. So I began to feel better temporarily then I started to feel worse again. My symptoms continued from 2001 through the end of 2003.
It was not long after this I started to wonder if my husband was causing my illness. I could not understand why I was unable to feel better. I was only 25 at the time and it seemed I shouldn’t be so sick so often. During this time we had our typically verbally abusive fights. It almost seemed like my husband hated me and was at war with me. Yet he did not want a divorce.
He would make many manipulative comments to try to drive fear into my divorce thoughts. All these comments were meant to make me afraid of how I would support myself if we got divorced.
- My co-working just got divorced and he got custody of his kids.
- I can be your best friend or your worst enemy
- You don’t have a college degree, no one will hire you, we should work on that
- If we get divorced how will you pay your bills, I do not want you living in a roach-infested apartment, why don’t we get you a degree
I also remember another comment very clearly, and it disturbs me to this day that he would say something like this to me:
“You know I have been so pissed at you at times, I could have thrown you through a wall, but I don’t.” he said to me.
“Emotional/Psychological abuse is referred to in the professional literature by many interchangeable terms such as: emotional abuse, covert abuse, psychological maltreatment, coercive abuse, abuse by proxy, and ambient abuse.” – CourtWatch, Emotional/Psychological Abuse Fact Sheet
So anyway, we would get in these awful fights. Then right after he would show up with food from a restaurant he went to or a Starbucks coffee. I think these were all typical domestic abuse reactions where they feel guilty and try to make it up. These fights were not occasional, in fact they were more often than not. I still describe my marriage as never being really good, it would go from bad to okay then back to bad. It never really had a good point.
I remember one night I couldn’t breathe and it was really scary. I called my ex-husband and told him I was afraid and to please come home. I think I was having a panic attack at the time. I ended calling 911 and they sent paramedics who sat and talked with me while I breathed into a bag. They stayed amazingly calm and helped me through it. My husband still did not come home after this.
At this point my migraines had gotten really bad and caused light sensitivity, floating spots and blurred vision. At some point the doctors wanted to send me in for a Catscan to try to figure out why I had migraines. During this time I was clenching my teeth in my sleep and breaking my own teeth but did not put the symptoms together.
I remember my mother was visiting me at the time. I also remember my ex-husband was out golfing and drinking with his buddies. So my mother had to watch our daughter and I had to drive myself to the appointment for the Catscan. They put me in the big machine where you have to lie completely still. I was kind of scary because it seems like you are in their forever and you have no concept of time. I was also afraid it was taking so long because they had found something. I also remember feeling really pissed that my ex-husband did not seem to care and should have been with me. Even that he was not home meant my mother couldn’t come with me and wanted to.
Anyways, yes I really began wondering if my ex-husband was doing this to me. I remember looking up the symptoms of arsenic poisoning. As crazy as I felt considering this I wondered how many other people had actually been poisoned and did not think they were.
When I left him in the end of 2003 and drove to my mother’s was when I began to feel so much better. I wrote in a previous comment that the further away I drove from my ex-husband the better I felt. As I was driving in my car at some point I remember my chest released for the first time in years. Apparently I had chronic anxiety that never went away until that moment. It was at that time I realized no matter how, my ex-husband was contributing to my symptoms.
During that time away from him I continued to feel better and started to get my strength back. I guess I had been living in such a toxic home environment that was so oppressive that it is no wonder I was sick all the time. I stayed away for 7 weeks and came back home in February 2004. I allowed him back into the home in the end of February and we stayed married until November 2004 when I finally left him for good.
I will say that when I first left him and got into my own house I went through a new set of symptoms. I think I dealt with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) for several months. I truly believe the reason I suffered with that was because I left a home that was in constant chaos, turmoil and flat out war-zone… and moved into a home that was quiet and peaceful. I think my body had a hard time processing that change. I had been so use to living under constant stress.
I am happy to say I began to feel much better throughout the year of 2005. My ex-husband continued relentlessly to attack, threaten and harass me and would often trigger symptoms. The good thing is they did not last and I knew he was a big trigger for me.
Today, I still feel good and I am also glad to say I can write about this stuff without feeling the pain and anger I once felt. I can even respond intelligently to my ex-husbands outbursts and my feelings of frustrating do not last as long.
So was my ex-husband poisoning me? I would have to say, yes perhaps he was. Whether it was poison delivered by his own hand or just the constant exposure to a toxic relationship. I do not remember ever feeling so sick before I met him nor since I left him. Either way he was pure poison for my body. I can tell you, his new wife, seems to get sick quite often. She even had a huge tumor removed from her stomach last year and I find it to be a strange coincidence that I had one removed from my colon when I was with him.
Facts About Psychological Abuse:
- Get the Facts About Psychological Abuse
- Emotional/Psychological Abuse Fact Sheet
- Gaslighting, Psychological Abuse
Is This Abusive 
I have the same symptoms as u
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My ex’s first wife died and I feel like I was heading to the grave as well. He was obsessed with making me coffee. I had GERD and ulcer and anemia and weight gain. After the first weekend without him I dropped 7 pounds. Then he left for 3 weeks and I lost a total of 30 pounds not eating any food form the house. I left him and feel fine now except for PTSD. People are toxic. I think he was poisoning me. I have no proof but feel like he was.
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I’m scared also I have started having bad symptoms again after having my brand new lil girl. Mine are almost the same. I’m starting to get blurred vision, muscle weakness, headaches and diaria. I feel achy all over and he’s acting as it’s actually cool for me to feel this way it disgusts me. I guess he will eventually kill me. He makes threats over finances and calls me bad names. I’m scared to leave I’ve been going through this for 6 yrs. I become pregnant the symptoms almost disappear. Now it’s going on again
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I really could not tell you if my illness was all in my head or not. I do know that the less contact I have with my ex-husband, the better I feel. So was he really poisoning me or was the relationship so toxic that I felt sick. My best guess is that the relationship with him was making me sick.
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My husband a master of gas lighting. Because he has always appeared as a nice, helpful and devoted guy, it was a long time before I admitted that he is really a nasty bastard who mistreats me with no guilt about it. He does things to me that he never would think about doing to another person. Telling me he’s going to be home at a certain time and coming home hours and hours later with no explanation nor apology and then walking through the door as he has done nothing wrong, because he really believes that my expecting him to do what he says he is going is crazier than his blowing me off. I have clearly been made physically by this man. I suffer from insomnia, indigestion, severe acid reflux, crying spells, difficulty making decisions, confusion, fatigue, constant feelings of anger and frustration, pain with no apparent cause, intense feelings of loneliness and isolation, etc. I don’t know what I’m going to do because I can’t seem to break away from this destructive man. And the fact that we live in a very isolated location makes the situation so much desperate. I’m feeling I am in an emotional emergency and I don’t know what to do next.
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This really hits home with me~ for years I was sick and for years no doctor could diagnose me. During that time my one dog died with suspicious symptoms~ internal bleeding~ that the vet wrote off as some weird blood disorder.
Everyone tried to tell me it was all in my head, but believe me, I was really ill. I could barely function, and could not eat without nausea meds. I suffered with this for seven years.
Once I made it clear to my ex-husband that I had to leave, the symptoms subsided. I am well now, but have gone for years without closure over what had happened to me. Two things have hung in my mind- a nurse practitioner told me that it was unusual for the body not to try to heal itself and to work properly, and a homeopath who was treating me swore up and down that somehow I was having ongoing contact with something that was causing the symptoms.
I have given this a lot of thought and prayer in the years since and here is the punchline – (not my ex-husband doing anything). Recently I remembered seeing my ex-brother-in-law in the store some years after I moved out and got well and the bad energy roiling off of him was scary. I would NOT have wanted to be alone with him under any circumstances. He is now dead, but had been working at a veterinary clinic in direct contact with the animals and meds at the time of my illness. He was always trying to ruin my marriage on the sidelines and hated women. Why I never suspected him of going as far as doing something like this, well- I was young and naïve.
I believe he may have been either poisoning me or drugging me (Estrogen comes to mind). He would have had plenty of opportunity/access to those kind of things-his mother’s medicine cabinet or the veterinary clinic. I know that there was plenty of opportunity for him to access our house and plant the stuff- I’m thinking toothpaste. I’m thinking estrogen because of some of the symptoms and how they seemed to linger (I was too young to be menopausal and whatever was going on was causing issues with my menstrual cycles- I felt just like I did when I took birth control pills against my cycle and it took me a month to get over the nausea, backaches and headaches- only 1000 times worse and ongoing).
I know that after I left my ex-husband, his dogs had all these injuries that were being chocked up to “running around too much” “hereditary” blah blah blah. Nonsense- they were being kicked- and badly and it wasn’t my ex-husband doing it. At first I thought it might have been an ex-boyfriend, but after considering the other pieces of the puzzle, I would have to agree with my ex-husband, who said he thought it was his brother.
Even though I can’t prove any of this- knowing what I know has given me some closure and at least I know I wasn’t some hysteric who was running around crying wolf. It cost me a lot- my job, my marriage, and to an extent, my health.
Believe me when I tell you, people can and do illegally and undetected enter households and do strange stuff. My current partner and I have an alarm system and we would not be without one.
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Bad people don’t like sharing half of their things with EX’s. Married longer than ten years and been a home maker? Alimony for a very long time plus half of EVERYTHING makes poisoning your mate even more possible. Why? Because it’s hard to detect. If you suspect it you need a doctor to help you monitor it but if your abuser finds out he/she will stop. So you need to find a way to do this where they will not catch on.
Know your phone is monitored your computer too. If you write in a journal stash it in a really good place. You can cause yourself a lot of danger by your journal entries being read. If you journal you have to document accurately. You’ll need this info later and the more detail you put into daily event journaling the more you’ll begin to see things you weren’t aware of before. Be sure to add the places you go and the places your mate goes what they tell you and what just happens through out your day.
Write down who besides your mate is in your life or that you talk to. All illness and all odd behaviors and what you ate and drank that day and about what time you consume is what you must write down. Let your mom or dad know that you have a hidden journal and you need them to get it if anything happens to you. Get poisons out of your house. Bug sprays, rat poison, borax acid, are just a few of the mostly used poisons around a persons house. So get rid of those things. Look around for those things. Notice how much is in these containers and has there been a lot used and it’s rather new?
You also should read about other things that can make you sick. A couple drops of visine in ones coffee will get you a entire day sitting on the potty, terrible cramps, sweating, & being completely unproductive! Salt too is toxic. Overly salted food will make you sick. Green Hawaiian Punch ? Make sure that no antifreeze was added to it? It tastes sweet. But it will slowly mess you up and eventually kill you.
We live in sick times. People who are this evil can’t pretend to be the great guy everyone loves, that loyal devoted husband and the gentle workaholic forever and their mask comes off and they abuse you because they know you cane pose them as the fake people they are. No one likes the world to see their private moments but these people who mimic normal loving caring people have a lot to lose they think if you tell the world that you married a fraud. An empty heartless vindictive soul. They are out to destroy you. They can’t love so they get off on controlling you. They know how to control you and get reactions from you. They want the world to see how crazy you are how sickly you are and how patient they have been putting up with it all. Justified in their secret affairs.
Know that in most situations these people have found new supply ( another woman or man on the side). These evil people can even get their new supply to help in tearing you down. There’s been many cases where the wife is killed by the other woman. The husband controlled that situation completely making the wife look like the only thing standing between the other woman getting together with that man and not the side dish. No woman wants to be the side dish missing out on all the holidays with her man. So you need to be careful.
Journaling is great too because many times you’ll find that that odd statement your evil mate said that made no sense at the time now makes total sense. And actions too begin to make your feelings right on target. Trust your gut! It’s your best friend. Speaking of best friend. This is a time that you can’t even tell your best friend about your journaling and monitoring illness with Doctor. Or your plans on getting out. Too many times your best friend has a secret relationship going with your mate. Yes people suck. Right now it’s you against the world.
If you have loving parents you’re lucky. But chances are there’s distance or something that keeps you from them. That’s what evil mates strive for. To keep you away from friends and family. To make you look crazy. They’ll even put drugs in food to get you to test dirty if the police come to the house. Plus like on meth you’ll just go off and have no control over yourself and cops coming to the scene will immediately know you are on meth. It happened to two of my friends. Their soon to be ex’s wanted them to suffer when they had courts see them as druggies and not get custody of the children. In one case it went down like that and devastated my friend who later commuted suicide though I know her ex helped with that. Hard to prove because she never wrote down her fears of feelings. And I understand that too cuz if her ex had gotten hold of that information of her fears and feelings he would have used that info to torture her more than he already was.
So keep journals well hidden. But do let someone you absolutely trust know you have it to get it if something happens to you. My second friend got smart and made a journal and had proof of her mate drugging her by doctors visits and monitoring everything. Her mate was arrested. One person I knew briefly thank god put fake pills in her husband emergency pill case he wore around his neck and that he relied on when he was having heart attack symptoms. Unfortunately her stepdaughter hated his new wife and had the pills tested when they failed to work like they had previously for him. It’s hard to prove. The pharmacy was under suspicion until cleared.
So next in line is the person who filled that emergency pill holder and put it around her husbands neck. This woman got away with it but her name is associated with people under suspicion of killing her husband. He had a life insurance policy she thought she was going to get. It was a huge blow to her that he never changed it and his first wife of 27 years was the beneficiary as well was his two children. He was only married 4 months to this second woman. I heard she got married again and her second husband recently passed away after being sick 6 months. She’s under investigation because the stepdaughter of her first husband kept this woman’s where about and the lines of communication open through good ole facebook.
Many poisoning’s look like everyday heart attacks, or bad livers, something not too alarming unless there’s reason to believe it foul play. It’s been found out that this woman got a life insurance lol you on her new husband the day after they married. There’s policies you can get without physicals before a policy is issued. Dumb on her part. Again it’s hard to prove. But if you have a doctor on your side helping monitor your illness the better for you to know for sure and get out before you’re driven to death at your mates doing. It’s not something people want to accept could be happening. These evil people will bring you flowers. They seem so sweet at times. They cried when your puppy got hit by a car. So how could they be trying to kill me? We can’t fathom such behavior because we aren’t evil but are empathic. What’s The opposite of empath? Go online and look it up. They say opposites attract and they aren’t kidding.
I’m typing on my tiny little phone and I hope this makes sense? Excuse typos. No glasses!! Yikes!
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Life can be so messy and sometimes lonely but always worth living! Married 31 years and have caught my husband in a on again off again online affair with his high school girlfriend but we are in our 50’ s now. He gaslighted me straight into a new universe! Swore on our children’s lives there was no affair, swore on his dead parents souls whom we had lost just 11 days apart from the other going so this was a fresh loss we suffered toward the end..meaning before Alexa told on him again figuratively speaking. I was told I was crazy, paranoid and I needed help mentally! The gaslighting done on me was so jaw dropping, so hurtful, so painful so unnecessary! My big question? How could he have ever loved me even a little and done it? The woman, a teacher of special needs and this will matter a little into my story. A married woman to a big sports great from the past so I heard? This left a giant question mark for me as her husband now a coach of a football team vs my husband who has severe RA that has crippled his hands and free and does require heavy medication? This is a head scratcher for me! They share horrible tales of their spouses with each other as fore play and then send naked photos and talk so raunchy with each other. This is all texting, sexting and emotionally driven by them it seemed. My husband wrote that all I do is work and the woman starts egging him on to leave his wife, he goes as far as to say he will in the night and leave me a note…he met another and wants too see where this goes …that was going to be my goodbye from my husband, the father of my children and my business partner to two businesses? That’s it? 31 years devotion and that’s my send off? See, we have a smart house but not a smart husband when it comes to electronics and he synced his phone to all smart devices in the home…..most would make me fall to the floor a weep and I would have to stop reading for a few days. I asked my husband if he was in love with her and he said “yes” I’m sorry and I said you will have to leave now you know and he said yes…..he texted his true love to find her text back was “why is your wife so mad? We were just having fun” and crushed my husbands heart….he really did fall in love with that avatar but the female avatar was just having fun with his heart! I literally let him come back home but many trust issues , many unresolved heart ache. He just says it wasn’t him, he felt lost, his meds made him do, his RA makes him feel undesired yada yada yada so no, you never get real answers just the avatar answers the classical IDK, I’m not sure and stop talking about this. If you take them back? Know this…nothing will ever be easy again….love is missing!
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