I'm glad to hear it's all corrected now. Without the gun in hand, it can be a bit harder to diagnose the problem. But as you have mentioned,, you were able to get a lot of great info here.
And you can see by the many pictures here,, guns do blow up. And sometimes they can take a bit of abuse before blowing up. Bullets stuck in the barrel, stacking up can truly be an interesting thing to discover. (I love the picture of the S&W with 8 slugs stuck. That means the shooter fired 6, reloaded, and fired at least 2 more. That shooter was clueless.)
I have a blown up SBH frame, I use in teaching. And I know a reloader who did a double charge & blew up a glock in his hand. He suffered an injury, but not too bad. He'd loaded 3000 rounds for competition on a Dillon 550 and forgot to rotate the shellplate once. He gave the ammo he'd loaded to a guy who was going to pull it all apart. He sold his 550 & bought a 650. (Auto-indexing.)
But reloading can be done very safely,, and has been for decades. But whomever is doing the loading needs to make sure of what they are doing, and pay attention all the time.
Glad it all turned out good for you!