47. Pressed The Reset Button Twice
I’d like to preface this by saying my husband is an electrical engineer and I’m a teacher. Also, we’re not crazy people. So, back when my husband and I were dating, my husband was in a terrible car crash. His truck hit black ice and he slid into oncoming traffic. His truck was completely totaled. So was the other truck he hit.
The weird thing is, both he and the other guy were completely fine. Not a scratch on them. All my husband had was a bruise on his knee. The first responders were baffled, as were the towing company and insurance when they realized no one had lost their lives or been severely injured. Fast forward to a few days after the crash, my husband comes over to my apartment.
We’re having a conversation about a university class we’re both in and he casually asks when I got the flatscreen TV sitting on my dresser. At this point, I’ve very confused because I’ve had the little flat screen since I was 13 and I’d had it the entire year and a bit we’d been dating. I asked him what he’s talking about, as I’ve always had that TV.
He told me to quit pulling his leg and asked me what I did with the old tube TV? I had no idea what he was talking about and told him so. He’s convinced I had a tube TV. I proceed to get on Facebook and showed him a picture we had taken two weeks prior with the TV in the background. It’s a flatscreen in the picture. His reaction was terrifying.
My husband goes white like he’s seen a ghost and just stares into space for a minute. His eyes started to water. I asked him what’s wrong and he said: “I swear to god, I’m not crazy. You’ve had a tube TV since we started dating. It was a tube TV when we took that picture.” I brushed it off as his head being rattled from the accident and he didn’t bring it up again.
However, anytime we hung out in my room, he’d always look at the TV just a little weird. Fast forward seven years, my husband and I have been married for a few years and decide that we’re ready to be parents. I’m not on birth control and we decide whatever happens, happens. We’re not actively trying, but not preventing it either.
So we’re on vacation in Italy, wandering around Rome and I feel like garbage. I’d had my period the week before and it was the worst one I had had in my whole life. As we’re walking around, I am suffering from back pain, chills, and horrific cramping. I go to the bathroom in a cafe and hurl my guts out, have diarrhea, and realize I’m menstruating, heavily.
Obviously I’m weirded out, since I had just had my period the week before. I clean myself up go back to my husband and tell him I think I need a doctor. I have a pretty high pain tolerance but this is insane. It’s getting to the point where I’m having trouble walking and I’m starting to feel pain in my shoulders. I don’t want to ruin our vacation, but I’m starting to really worry.
My husband is smarter than me, sees the state I’m in, and says I’m visibly paler than when I went into the bathroom, so he gets me help. 20 minutes later I’m on a stretcher and being taken to the hospital. An hour after that, I get the diagnosis, and it’s terrifying. I’m being prepped for emergency surgery as the doctor tells me I have a ruptured ectopic pregnancy.
I have heavy internal bleeding and if he doesn’t perform surgery I am not going to make it. Six hours later, I wake up very sore and tired. The doctor tells me I’ve very lucky, and if I had waited any longer to seek medical attention I’d be a goner. My husband stays with me in the hospital the first night, then gets a hotel for the rest of my stay.
A week later we’re cleared to fly home and I go through a grueling month of healing from the surgery. Two months after our return, somehow my husband and I get on the topic of fires. He goes on about the dangers of kitchen fires and I say, “No need to worry, we’re all set with the extinguisher in the closet.” His reaction freaks me out agan.
He looks at me like I have three heads and asks me what I’m talking about. I remind him about the extinguisher in the front closet where we keep the coats. We’ve had it for three years. He insisted we buy one when we bought our house. My husband shakes his head and tells me he has no idea what I’m talking about and we don’t have a fire extinguisher.
I remind him about my memories of fighting about if we really needed one, where to put it, buying it from Home Depot, and also installing it to the wall in the closet. He looks at me with confusion and tells me none of that happened. I get up, go to front closet to show it to him, all the while cursing him for being an jerk for forgetting our two-week fight about it and lo and behold: no extinguisher.
Not only is there no extinguisher, there are no holes in the wall where I know we installed it. No fresh paint, this wall has never been touched…I insist he’s moved it and fixed the wall and ask why in heaven’s name he would play such a stupid prank. He continues to insist we’ve never had one, let alone talked about getting one.
This goes on for several minutes. I’m approaching hysterics, telling him to quit playing with me when finally he says: “Now you know how I feel about that TV.” We didn’t speak about it for a long time. Later, he brought up his theory that perhaps in another timeline or dimension, or whatever you want to call it, we both actually passed after our related near-misses.
He thinks we reset like a video game and the TV and extinguisher are glitches. I don’t know if I agree with him, all I know is that I have never been so rattled in my whole life and every time I get something out of the closet I’m overwhelmed with this feeling of wrongness. I know it should be there but somehow it’s just not. I can’t explain it. He says he will go to his grave swearing I had a tube TV.