“Hold for Dr. Zuckerman” she said to me when I answered my phone at work one day. I recognized his nurse’s voice. I had gone for my routine annual exam and PAP test the previous week. I had been having gynecological care for 20 years and I had never had any issues.

Dr. Zuckerman came on the phone and said “Nance (he always called me “Nance”) we have a problem”. “Your pap test came back and you have HPV with condyloma and I need to do a biopsy.” I was stunned.

I had the biopsy and it confirmed the original diagnosis that I had HPV (Human Papillima Virus). Dr. Zuckerman called me and told me to come to his office so we could talk about how to treat it.

He was a direct no nonsense person and when I saw him in his office he said “Nance there is only one way that you got this. It was sexually transmitted. This is not something you got from a toilet seat.” He then said “I know you and I am telling you that you need to get your ex-ex-husband checked.”

Those words kept haunting because without saying so directly what he was telling me was that my ex-husband had given me a very serious STD.

This was just a different form of abuse. Yes, I had been physically, emotionally and sexually abused for years but now I found out that I was being abused by his dangerous sexual activity. This was 1989 and AIDS was rampant so who knows what I could have contracted from him?

I was sick to my stomach going home on the train and I was scared to death of what his reaction would be when I told him that he needed to see a doctor.

When I got home and confronted my ex-husband and told him that he needed to get checked he said that he refused to get checked. He yelled and slapped me around and told me that I should never have gone to the doctor in the first place. He told me that I probably got STD from the doctor’s dirty instruments.