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Something Was Wrong is intended for mature audiences. Episodes discuss topics that can be triggering, such as emotional, physical, and sexual violence, suicide, and murder. I am not a therapist or a doctor. If you're in need of support, please visit somethingwaswrong.com slash resources for a list of non-profit organizations that can help.
Some names have been changed for anonymity purposes. Opinions expressed by guests on the show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of myself or AudioChuck.
Resources and source material are linked in the episode notes. Thank you so much for listening. Danielle was thrilled when she met Artie, fell in love, and started planning their future together. She was feeling confident about moving forward with their plans to marry. Until Danielle's family told her they had some suspicions about Artie. I'm Tiffany Reese, and this is Something Was Wrong.
Shortly around that time, one of my sisters and my father had asked to go to lunch with me. And at lunch, my sister reveals that it's possible that Artie is cheating on me.
Her husband has a very large extended family. So one of his cousins had a coworker who was showing her pictures of this guy she had met online, but hadn't met in person yet. And when she showed his cousin the picture, the cousin said, I know this guy. Yeah.
He is my cousin's wife's sister's boyfriend. He's in a relationship. And I guess this girl had texted him, hey, are you in a relationship? And Artie had responded, nope, I'm perfectly single.
So the girl had sent the screenshot of the messages and the photo he had. And it's this photo of him in scrubs with his stethoscope around his neck. He's in the car taking a selfie and sends it to her coworker who sends it to my sister. My sister shows me these and obviously my mind was kind of reeling right then.
Confused and upset, Danielle drove back to her apartment and texted Artie to confront him.
He called me and I asked him point blank, what is this? You know, he admitted that there had been some flirting, but he didn't intend to meet up with her. Things had been a little bit tense with us arguing. He felt like our communication wasn't there, that there was a distance between us. And that had kind of led him to flirt with another woman.
He told me he was dropping what he was doing, leaving the hospital, and he was coming home immediately to talk to me. I called my grandmother and I asked for her advice. And she basically told me, all men cheat. So I was like, well, that doesn't help me. Because if what you're saying is true, then it doesn't matter if I stay or go. Then I hung up with her and I called my best friend. And I said, look...
I really need your advice. And, you know, she's another strong woman. So I was like, I know you're going to want to tell me to leave, but I need you to be objective. And here's the situation. And what do you think?
And, you know, she had admitted to me that her long-term boyfriend had done a little flirting with another woman. And ultimately, nothing had happened physically. So they decided to work on things and it never happened again. This was somebody I loved and somebody I wanted to build a life with, somebody I was engaged to. So I do know that cheating happens in relationships. Lots of stuff happened in relationships. And you just have to make an effort to see what are those things you want to work on.
Artie came home and he and Danielle sat down to talk things out. Danielle thought things over and decided that ultimately, since they hadn't met up, she felt that perhaps this was an anomaly. Feeling that they could work through this, Danielle got Artie to agree to attend couples therapy.
That was a big deal because he was completely against going to a therapist. We did go to a few sessions, but ultimately we ended up stopping because I had gotten a promotion and I had to move to San Diego.
July of 2013, Danielle was offered a major promotion at work. The only downside? She'd have to move a few hours south to San Diego.
not only could Artie not move because he was in the middle of his internship, but it was, you know, literally 30 day notice. So in order to not upend his life, I basically had two apartments. I had an apartment that I had a roommate with in San Diego and I would be there Monday through Friday. And then I would take the train back on the weekends and I would have my apartment there.
And I basically paid for two apartments. He never visited me in San Diego. He'd always told me he hated San Diego for some reason. So I just kind of focused on work when I was there.
Probably a month or two after I had moved down to San Diego, I'm literally in the middle of launching this new market. I just moved into this new apartment. I'm still getting my bearings and I'm on a scale of one to 10. My stress level is like 12. And I get an email from my sister and she says that the family suspects that Artie does not work at UCLA.
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don't even remember what was going through my head other than sheer panic. I remember calling the hospital and asking for him and the receptionist telling me that there's nobody by the name of Artie that works there. So I call him and confront him
I tell him that I've called the hospital, that this guy doesn't know him. And he gives me this, the reasoning behind it was that because he had been in the military and we had been on these crazy top secret missions where being a sniper, he had to kill his targets. And because of that, when he came to the US, he basically had to maintain the strictest privacy.
And so one of the things he had done is that, you know, anybody at the hospital knows not to say that he works there. When it came down to my stepfather's friend not knowing him, I worked in a hospital. I just sort of thought this guy can't possibly know every intern and person in this hospital. I mean, it's a huge hospital system.
The other piece of evidence that Artie presented to me, he FaceTimed with me and he showed me his hospital ID badge.
I chose to take his side. And, you know, I think I emailed back with my family and we're telling them this. And at that time, Artie had access to a computer I had at home that my email was in. And so he chose to go into this laptop and go into my email and look at and respond to this email.
Not only had Artie shown Danielle his hospital badge, but he would send her photos and videos of himself at work. He'd ask Danielle to bake treats for his co-workers. He'd spend hours after work shifts describing procedures he'd done that day with great detail to Danielle. She had no doubts about how many hours he was spending at the hospital, and she chalked all of this up to her family being overprotective. As for Artie, well, he was pissed.
He lashed out in a way that I didn't condone it at the time, but also I understood where his anger came from. You know, he was kind of backed into this corner and he was being unjustly accused and
And he already has kind of that personality where he doesn't take shit from anybody. So, of course, he lashes out at my family. My middle sister in particular decided to be a little more confrontational. My middle sister is going at it with him and he calls me. He's beyond irate and he starts making threats.
I'm going to get your sister fired from her job. I know people that can plant drugs on her and make sure she gets fired from her job. And I do remember calling my parents and just being like,
please tell her to stop responding to him. And I didn't think he would really make good on his threats. You know, he's one of those people sometimes where his bark is bigger than his bite, but it was not helping the situation for her to keep going at him, especially when I'm taking his side. So it's serving zero purpose other than to make things more stressful for me.
Ultimately, Danielle felt that her family just didn't like Artie's personality. Her family was more reserved and conservative, and Artie could be very brash and obnoxious.
It just kind of felt like they were maybe jumping the gun and basing it off of nothing, except for the fact that they had also known about the girl that he had texted and said he was single. On their daughter and their sister, they're going to be a little bit protective. And I think that they just sort of seized on this moment to say he doesn't work there, but there was no evidence to show that that was the case.
So I didn't talk to my family for nearly two years. That fall, you know, was really the first time that I was facing the holidays and not spending it with my family. We went to Disneyland on Thanksgiving. And listen, even though I'm talking to my family now, I still advocate doing Disneyland on Thanksgiving. It was so much fun.
So I didn't really miss my family that year for Thanksgiving, but obviously that wasn't so much the case for Christmas. That was a little harder for me. Though Danielle missed her family, she chose to focus her energy on her career and taking her relationship with Artie to the next level by planning for a family.
I'm a planner. When I have a plan in place, there isn't much that stops me from making it happen. I had always planned to take this promotion, but I wanted to be back in LA no more than a year and a half later. I also wanted to have a child. And I felt that from a career perspective, if I got pregnant within a year of moving down there, I could be back in LA within a year and a half. And
And my pregnancy would allow me to do that. In spring of 2014, I started taking prenatal vitamins and went off of birth control and started really amping up family planning.
I have endometriosis and I'd had two surgeries for it. So there was also this sort of biological time clock ticking because I'd always been told from my doctors, from my younger sister who also has it and had to have IVF that the clock was ticking for me and I had to kind of get on it.
My doctors had always said, you're not going to be the woman who is able to have kids when she's 40. You're going to have to do this much earlier. So obviously, I had been conditioned to think that I had to have children relatively early. There did seem to be a little bit of pressure there that I was putting on myself. But obviously, I was with somebody that wanted children. So I already wanted to start a family. And so...
I started doing that. Around that same time, I really wanted to amp up planning the wedding and kind of just getting that going. We started to look at venues and I went and bought my wedding dress.
I figured if I started in spring of 2014, kind of trying to get pregnant, that it could take me a year, hell, maybe even two years to get pregnant. I found out I was pregnant three weeks after buying my wedding dress. It's still sitting in my closet. Danielle was nervous to tell her parents that she was pregnant, especially since they hadn't spoken in two years.
She worried that their dislike of Artie would impact their ability to be happy for her. But thankfully, they were thrilled and wanted to support her. I'm sure they had their concerns in the back of their minds, but ultimately they were supportive of me being pregnant. And that made me feel a whole lot better.
Fall of that year, I managed to transfer back to the LA office. I had a baby shower with friends. I think my parents came, but my sisters weren't there. We weren't talking still. You know, I just made the best of it. It was what it was. I wasn't thrilled with the situation, but you know, it was better than nothing.
After her baby shower, Danielle, eight months pregnant, packed up her entire San Diego apartment and moved all her stuff back into her L.A. area condo with Artie.
If you know me, I'm incredibly independent. And so it was like not a big deal to me to kind of move on my own. But kind of in hindsight now, if I had a girlfriend who was eight months pregnant and trying to move by herself, I would go out there and help her. Just a friend.
But also, I mean, he was working like 80 hours a week. So for me, it was just part of the nature of being with a physician, right? He was still doing his internship. He'd be going into his residency that fall. I would talk to doctors' wives. Hell, I would talk to my own OB. And he would say he remembers his poor wife being all alone because he was working doubles and 60 to 80 hours a week.
So him not being around and always working was always in line with the feedback that I had gotten from other people.
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That Thanksgiving, Danielle's labor slowly began. After they finished dinner with friends, Artie drove Danielle to her parents' house because he had to go into work until she was in active labor. Danielle texted Artie when she was taken by her parents to labor and delivery. She was in labor into the next morning when Artie finally arrived.
He showed up around 9 or 10 a.m. I had to have an emergency C-section because she had the cord wrapped around her neck. So he was there when I was going into surgery and kind of in the room with me watching the procedure as it was happening. He was holding the baby and kind of bonding with her. And that was really great. And my parents did come and visit us. My sister did not.
And that's okay. That didn't bother me. I knew why. I was released and we had to go to the pediatrician that day. You're supposed to get them checked out immediately. So we drive back. I'd already picked out this pediatrician. We're in the office. She checks out the baby. Baby's great. Turns to me and asks how I'm doing. And I just broke down sobbing. I was a mess. He was going back to work that night.
I was going to be alone with the baby all night. I hadn't quite figured out the breastfeeding situation because I was getting so many different opinions from all the different nurses in the hospital that I didn't know what was up from down. We got back out to the parking lot and he did say he was kind of embarrassed by my outburst.
I did not apologize for it, but I did wind up calling my parents and I was like, I cannot do this by myself all night.
Seeing that she needed support, Danielle's parents invited her and baby Carrie to stay at their home for the first two months while Danielle recovered from surgery. It was nice to have the extra hands to help just be able to take a shower or do anything. During those two months, he was working so many hours, he would not always come when he could to
Sometimes he was super exhausted. So he would just kind of crash at home. When he was there, though, I have to say he wasn't really hands on with me or helping me or the baby. It's not that he didn't interact with the baby. But I just feel like there are some men that just aren't good with infants. And that's kind of what I chalked it up to. You wouldn't stay that long. And
And I also chalked that up to him just being, there's still tension, right? From like the whole fight. Right.
So just having everybody in the same room at that point was a win for me. Before I went into labor, we'd had actually quite a few issues with our landlord. So I was like, we need my family's help if you're going to be working 68 hours a week. So I looked for a place and moved in. After a few months, Danielle returned to work and her stepmom took care of Carrie. She was thankful to have her parents' support during such a difficult time.
I will say that it wasn't an easy transition. Artie and I were starting to argue a lot. Still full of hormones.
I had postpartum. I started seeing a therapist weekly. It was more of postpartum anxiety, to be honest. It wasn't quite depression, but it was definitely a lot of exacerbated anxiety. And I'd always had anxiety issues in my 20s.
But over time, I had learned a lot of coping mechanisms. So I hadn't had an anxiety attack in years before.
But obviously, when you're up all night and you're breastfeeding and you're dealing with all these hormones, every single coping mechanism and self-care you had before goes out the window. You're starting from scratch. It's like walking around with your hands tied behind your back. So I went to therapy. I didn't really have a lot of friends with children. So it was hard. I didn't get much help from Artie because he was working all the time. And
And we were arguing. Danielle was surprised to see Artie return home one day from work wearing sweatpants instead of his usual scrubs. Perplexed, she asked him why he wasn't wearing his uniform. Artie told her that he was carjacked and his clothes had been taken into evidence by detectives.
I was driving and a man came up with a gun and tried to carjack him and he wound up kind of getting away, driving off. You know, he went to the police station and tried to file a report. And I go to the police station and he's in one room and the detective asks me to sit down with him and talk to me. He just asked me basic questions, you know, his name and where he was from and, you know, all this stuff. And I was like, okay, this is weird, but whatever. ♪
And that's it. Then I take him, we go to the impound lot and we get his car.
Over, I don't know how long, it could have been a period of weeks, he's telling me that this detective is harassing him. He's called his work. His work made him do a drug test. Now they're almost like convinced that the whole carjacking happened because of a drug bust or something. Like he had drugs and that's why he got carjacked. That was kind of like this working theory. We didn't quite understand why this detective was like coming at him so hard.
And he was like calling his friends and stuff. And he told me he called the detective and was like, I'm withdrawing my complaint about the carjacking because you're like basically trying to cause trouble in my life. And for no reason. Now you're turning it on me. Like I'm the one that got carjacked. And now all of a sudden you're acting like I'm the criminal. So a few weeks of this and I get a phone call. I'm at home and it's the detective.
And I don't quite remember what questions he was asking me. But when I repeat that he's from the UK, he said he didn't have an accent with me. I was like, are you crazy? How do you not hear his accent? He's like, he didn't have an accent. And I was just like, this guy is nuts. And then he says he gave me a name other than Artie.
I got silent. In my head, I was just like, I don't know what the hell is happening right now. That's next time on Something Was Wrong.
Something Was Wrong is an Audiochuck original. Thank you so much to our team. Executive Producer, Ashley Flowers. Coordinating Producer, Mike McDonald. Mixing and Mastering by Kyle O'Connor. Created, reported, and hosted by me, Tiffany Reese. Our theme song was originally composed by Gladrags, covered this season by Midwest Originals.
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