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My marriage
was fourteen years of hell,
most days I lived in a daze.
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My life was a nightmare
sometimes he had beaten me
so badly that I had to go to bed.
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He did that three or four times a year.
In 1985, the year of my miscarriage,
it had happened almost a dozen times.
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In September of that year
I had been coughing up blood.
He held off sex for three days.
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I was hoping it would stop,
but it always got worse
and I ended up at the hospital.
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Where he told me what to say.
It turned out I had a broken rib
that was poking my lung.
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I told them I fell downstairs
for the second time in three months
and not even the intern believed it.
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But no one asked
any uncomfortable questions
they just fixed me up and sent me home.
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My husband, Norman,
knew nobody would think
a police officer was a wife beater.
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