As her husband lay unconscious in a hospital bed, clinging to life after narrowly surviving a car crash in January 2022, his wife sat weeping at his bedside, overcome with guilt.
Mum-of-two Kate Sifuentes feared her husband had attempted to respond to her text messages while at the wheel, causing him to crash.
So she checked his phone – and uncovered a slew of texts, dating app profiles and social media direct messages proving that he’d been cheating on her with many other women, New York Postreports.
But after spending months nursing him back to health – helping him relearn how to walk, talk, eat and use his phone – she found out that he’d been using his reacquired motor skills to cheat on her again.
“I was the one who freaking taught him how to use his phone, just for him to start talking to females again,” Ms Sifuentes, 24, from North Carolina, says in her now-viral TikTok tell-all.
In the video, which has had more than 1.1 million views, she explained that when her unnamed husband, who she said regularly travelled for work, failed to answer her calls on that fateful day last January, she began to worry for his safety.
Her worst fears were eventually confirmed when a highway patrol officer called to inform her of the crash.
“All we know is that your husband was in a car accident, he’s alive and being flown to the hospital,” she said the officer told her.
After rushing to his bedside, where doctors told her he’d sustained a severe traumatic brain injury and had suffered “many, many strokes,” Ms Sifuentes decided to check her husband’s phone activity – a task she said she had “never done before”.
“Immediately pops up a conversation with another female on a different Snapchat account and under a different name. A Snapchat I’d never seen before,” she said in the video.
“So, I keep looking … and there was all these women all over,” she said. “He was on so many dating sites under [a different] name.”
Once her husband regained consciousness after 30 days, she immediately confronted him about his apparent infidelity.
According to Ms Sifuentes, although he could barely talk and had failed to recognise himself in the hospital mirror, he admitted to the affairs.
“He said he was sorry, and said all the sh*t that guys say to get you back,” she said, “so I stayed a few more months.”
In a subsequent post, Ms Sifuentes said her husband was ultimately transferred out of the hospital and into an intensive therapy rehabilitation centre for extended care.
While there, she agreed to undergo marriage counselling through the facility.
“I wanted to say that I fought for my marriage and I tried to make my marriage work,” she said.
But, she said, her husband “lied through the whole thing”.
“He was talking to all these women,” she said, noting that she’d begun routinely checking his phone. “He didn’t even try to hide it anymore.
“So at that point, I was like, ‘I’m done.’”
She said she allowed her husband to return to their home for a few months until his mother was able to relocate and move in with him in a separate apartment.
“I gave him back to his mama,” she said.
“We’ll be filing [for divorce] soon.
“But, he wants to take me to court because he wants everything we’ve ever owned.”
She ended the follow-up clip vowing to never remarry.
“The cost of a freaking divorce lawyer [is] insane,” she said.
Astounded TikTok watchers weighed in with their thoughts.
“Almost lost his life but did not lose the AUDACITY smh. He did not deserve you,” one commenter said.
“They don’t change. I hope you have been able to heal and move on. You deserve so much better than that,” another said.
Others shared similar tales.
“OMG, our stories are so similar! Prayers and proud of you! I stayed for two years after his wreck and [traumatic brain injury],” one wrote.
“I have almost the exact same story … my ex had a stroke and I also found out he was having an affair while having a procedure … stayed together six months,” said another.
“My now ex took another female on a cruise with him, while our twins were in the NICU at two weeks old,” added another. “He regrets nothing. They won’t ever change!”
This story originally appeared on the New York Post and reproduced with permission