The other day I was looking at our ward white board and saw the diagnosis "post quetal." I've gotten fairly good at figuring out the creative spellings and abbreviations in use on the maternity ward ("ND + tovince" = a normal delivery of twins), but this one I could not decipher. "What does she have?" I asked one of the midwives. She motioned me aside and whispered the story to me. The girl has been married the day before. She had suffered the kind of "post coital" injury seen in traumatic rape cases. This is not an uncommon occurrence. We recently had another new bride with a 3cm laceration that had to be repaired in the operating room.
Blood is a sign of virtue here, or maybe just one sign of the violence that so many Afghan women endure.
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