He Was Planning to Propose. Then She Blocked His Number.

He was mid-proposal planning when the pain hit, he says. Five years together, a ring already bought, and then eleven o'clock on a Saturday night when his right testicle started to swell.

She was at a club five minutes away. He called. She declined. He texted that something was wrong and she needed to come home. She replied asking what it was, he writes, with an unimpressed emoji. He called again. Declined again. He texted that he needed to go to the hospital. She asked why. He said his balls hurt.

She sent back laughing emojis.

He called a third time. Declined. He called a fourth time. She told him, according to the post, that if he contacted her again she'd block his number. He tried anyway. She blocked him.

The pain was bad enough that he'd collapsed trying to stand. Bad enough that he was vomiting on the carpet. He called emergency services and told them somebody could drive him — he thought she'd be home soon, he says, and he felt embarrassed asking for an ambulance because his balls hurt. The operator said she'd call back in ten minutes to confirm he was on his way. He went back to throwing up.

When the operator called back, he asked for the ambulance. It came. He had testicular torsion. The surgeon stitched the testicle back together. He was lucky, the doctor told him. He could easily have lost it.

He woke up to missed calls and messages. She'd come home from the club at three in the morning, smelled the vomit, got angry, searched the apartment for him, and only then realised he'd been serious. He texted her which hospital. She came. She slept on the couch in his room. When she woke, she apologised. She thought he was joking, she said. She thought he was trying to ruin their night.

She stayed with him for the two days he was in hospital and took good care of him, he writes. He's been home a day. He still wants to dump her.

The strongest case for staying: she's twenty-two. She made a catastrophically bad call under pressure in a loud room. She thought it was a prank — maybe he has form, maybe she's been burned before by someone faking an emergency for attention, maybe she just got it badly wrong. She came as soon as she knew. She stayed. She's apologised. People are allowed one unforgivable mistake if they own it completely.

The strongest case for leaving: she didn't pick up once. Not after the second call. Not after the text saying hospital. She saw the words "my balls hurt" and decided it was a joke, then threatened to block him when he kept trying, then followed through. The club was five minutes away. She stayed until three in the morning. She got angry about the vomit before she got worried about where he was. The care she gave him afterward doesn't undo the care she didn't give him when it mattered. And if this is what she does in an emergency, what does the next one look like?

The comments leaned toward dumping her, though not unanimously. A few pointed out that testicular pain doesn't sound serious if you don't know what testicular torsion is, and asking a drunk person at a club to make a medical judgement is a stretch. One asked why he didn't call his parents, or an Uber, or anyone other than another twenty-two-year-old. Another noted that "my balls hurt" does sound a lot like a drunk booty call, and wondered if there was history here the post wasn't giving.

But most of the responses came down on his side. One commenter, blunt, called her trash and said marrying her would be the biggest mistake of his life. Several said the issue wasn't the mistake itself but the pattern it suggested — the assumption that his emergency was a prank, the anger about the vomit, the hours that passed before she checked. One pointed out that she didn't just ignore him; she escalated to a threat and then a block. That's not confusion. That's a choice.

He's conflicted, he says. He feels like she genuinely thought he was joking. He feels like she made a mistake. He also feels beyond hurt. He wanted to break up with her in the hospital bed. He still wants to break up with her now.

The ring's still wherever he put it. The question is whether the person he bought it for is the person who blocked his number, or the person who slept on the hospital couch, or whether those are the same person and that's the problem.

If your partner called you four times in ten minutes and said they needed to go to the hospital, would you pick up?