My first encounter with a victim of domestic violence happened one early morning in the ER a month after I’d started. I saw a young woman with a black eye, pushing her body through the doors as she held onto her baby. Blood streamed down her face from a cut. “I can’t stop the bleeding,” she whispered. As I began to clean her up and apply pressure to the wound to stop the blood flow, I asked her how it happened. I thought maybe she’d been in a car accident. “I walked into a door,” she said. Later, one of the other nurses said, “She walks into a door almost every week. It’s called wife battering. She’s too afraid to report him or leave—she needs to feed her baby, so she stays.” I entered this new world in shock and disbelief. I had only known unconditional love in my family. Domestic violence didn’t exist in my universe.