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On the night of Oct. 5, 2015, Todd Long said he felt the way someone explained the sensation of a heart attack to him: like an elephant was sitting on his chest.

Earlier that night, he had come home planning to draw up divorce papers with his now-ex-wife, Dawn Long, with whom he had been discussing divorce since around March of that year.

Long had made himself a drink that evening and thought the rum he used didn’t taste quite right. He made a second drink and said that when he poured it out, Dawn Long got angry with him.

After Dawn Long went to bed, Todd Long went outside, and he soon started throwing up.

“I just thought maybe I was getting sick or something,” he told The Daily Republic on Friday, a day after Dawn Long agreed to a plea deal that could land her in prison for up to eight years for her actions against her former husband.

As the hours went on during that October day, Todd Long started to lose vision and couldn’t breathe while lying down. Long said it became clear that something wasn’t right. He threw up several times in the bathroom, outside Dawn Long’s bedroom, and he said that she never came out of her room. He eventually called a friend and went to the hospital.

“Right when I said, ‘I think she’s trying to poison me,’ the nurse walked in and heard it,” Todd Long said. “And she said, ‘Either you’re calling it in or I’m calling it in.'”

The friend who had helped Long get to the hospital eventually called the police. In the following months, Dawn Long was charged with attempted first-degree murder in connection with the incident. It wasn’t long before her arrest in December 2015 that Todd Long learned that caffeine had been what caused him to feel like he was having a heart attack.

She was later also charged with reckless burning for allegedly setting fire to the house where she and Todd Long had planned to continue living after their divorce for the benefit of their son, who was in sixth grade at the time.

Todd Long has mostly declined comment on the case, but on Friday he sat down with The Daily Republic to give his account of the near-death experience and the long, drawn-out situation with his ex-wife.

Their house has been boarded up and unoccupied for more than three years, and during most of that time, Dawn Long has been out on bond. Since her arrest, she’s moved to Ethan and had a baby, and Todd Long says the thought of running into his ex-wife in public makes him anxious.

“I’ve actually quit going to Walmart, because that’s where she usually shopped. The possibility of running into her coming around an aisle would’ve been more than enough,” he said.

On Thursday, after having pleaded not guilty to both charges for more than three years, Dawn Long pleaded no contest to aggravated assault, and the state dropped the original charges. She’ll be sentenced on April 30, and the court agreed Thursday to a maximum possible sentence of 15 years in prison with seven years suspended.

Todd Long said he hoped to testify at a jury trial that Dawn Long’s actions were planned well in advance and were not the impulsive decisions of an emotional person.

“Even though, in the past, she hasn’t had a criminal record, this wasn’t just an, ‘Oh, I got emotional and I grabbed a hammer and hit him over the head.’ That would’ve been more explainable than this whole plan she had,” he said. “Everything was planned out.”

Todd Long said that plan went as far back as when divorce was first discussed. At that time, he said, Dawn Long began telling people she had a brain tumor. Todd Long said he became skeptical of this a few weeks before she purchased caffeine pills in July.

“In between the poisoning and getting out and having a house fire, the odd twist is, she’s faking cancer, they found out that I had cancer,” Todd Long said.

Dawn Long’s attorney did not respond to a message from The Daily Republic for comment on this story.

Todd Long said that while the past three years have been emotional for him and his now-15-year-old son, he’s grateful to the members of the Mitchell Police Division and Mitchell Fire Department for their work on the case, as well as to his friends, family and others in Mitchell who have helped them.

Todd Long said he’ll presumably have more to say on the case following April 30, the day he will finally have closure on the series of events that turned a plan to file for divorce into a criminal investigation that’s now affected him for nearly three and a half years.

“We were getting divorced. Somewhere along the line, her plan changed,” he said.