When 27-year-old Kirsty Rathbone, from Liverpool in the UK, learned she was pregnant with her boyfriend’s baby, she was overjoyed.
She’d only been dating Gary Edwards – who she met on an internet dating site – for a few months, but the pair had already begun searching for homes to move into together.
“Gary was over the moon and the news made us more determined to find a home together,” Kirsty, already a mum of two daughters, told The Sun.
“Finally, our perfect family would be complete.”
But when she woke up one morning covered in blood, she knew something was wrong.
She and Gary rushed to the hospital's emergency department. Doctors couldn't find her baby, and told her she would need more tests to discover what had gone wrong.
Kirsty said she was "terrified" throughout the process, and to make matters worse, her boyfriend Gary was hardly around.
When doctors told Kirsty the worst possible news - her pregnancy was ectopic and they needed to remove the foetus immediately or she could die - she was "heartbroken".
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"I rang Gary and he promised he'd be there for me before I went into surgery," Kirsty said.
"But the next day, as I was being prepped for surgery, Gary was nowhere to be seen."
When she woke from surgery, Gary greeted her with a big bunch of flowers - "all my anger faded away," Kirsty said - and after her recovery, he moved into her home.
But just a week later, Kirsty's phone rang. On the other end of the line was a woman claiming she was Gary's girlfriend.
Mum, 27, who nearly died after suffering an ectopic pregnancy tells of heartbreak after discovering her boyfriend … https://t.co/cHCyvWLavb
— The Sun Woman (@TheSunWoman) July 31, 2017