Axe Woman

When I was a nurse, very many years ago, I saw many things which my seventeen years of life had not prepared me for.



I saw people who were ill and got better.  I saw people who were ill and died.  I learned to distinguish the acrid smell of road-dirt from the dank aroma of pit-dirt and I learned how to smile with my eyes when my face was behind a treatment mask.  I saw people neglected because they’d outlived their relatives and healthy friends.  I saw people so loved they needed almost all the chairs at visiting times.  I saw the aftermath of violence.



The axe woman was a patient on the head injury ward.  She looked just like any other fifty-something woman except for a deep cleave down the middle of her skull, where her husband had hit her with an axe.



He’d pretty-much split her brain in two, so it didn’t function properly, anymore. 



The other nurses said he’d come home and found her drunk and he’d flipped and grabbed the axe and hit her with it.  They said, if they’d lived with someone who was always drunk, they might have done the same.  I thought, if I’d lived with the kind of person who might split my head with an axe, I’d probably get drunk all the time, too.



Nowadays, the thing to do would be to find somewhere else to live.  Nowadays, the case would be investigated by the police and the perpetrator would answer for his actions.



In those days, if a woman cleaved her man’s head with an axe, she’d go to prison for a very long time.  One would hope, it was turn and turn-about.  But this was the seventies and men were expected to be violent while women were expected to accept every humiliation with grace and dignity.



And abuse within marriage was not a crime.