Ebele Achonu woke up in the intensive care unit at Duke University Hospital and immediately thought to call her boss. She tried reaching for the telephone but couldn't move. Thickly wrapped splints immobilized both arms. A brace enveloped a deep gash on the back of her neck. Bandages wrapped her fractured skull, and tubes snaked from her body to the wall behind.

Her right hand was gone.

So she tried something else.

"Please help me with the phone," she remembers asking the nurse at her side. "I need to call my job. I won't be in today."

"They already know," the nurse replied. "You don't need to worry about work right now."

"What do you mean I don't have to worry? It is Monday. I'm supposed to work today."

"It's not Monday," the nurse said. "It's Wednesday."

Ebele's mind raced, and she began to absorb what had happened.

She thought back to Sunday. She remembered the phone call with her best friend from Nigeria, the discussion about her failing marriage and deep unhappiness. She remembered hearing her husband, Victor, come up behind her in their home in Southeast Raleigh. She felt blows. She glimpsed the machete. She remembered lying on her carpeted bedroom floor, staring at her two hands, limp and nearly severed, and watching her blood spread around her.

She remembered thinking she was dying.

Instead, she had survived one of the most brutal acts of domestic violence possible shy of murder.

And she realized at that moment, in that hospital bed, that she was free. No one would ever take that from her again.

Always independent

Ebele's resolve to push forward, so evident when she regained consciousness at Duke that Wednesday in October 2003, is common among victims of domestic violence. As for so many women, that drive created conflict in Ebele's marriage to Victor Achonu -- then served an entirely different purpose after the marriage ended and Victor was safely in prison: It propelled her through her recovery.

Ebele's independence defined her even as a schoolgirl, when her mother had worried that Ebele was "wayward," says her best friend from childhood, Amarachi Chibundu. That label, Chibundu says, is less an accusation of misconduct than a warning that the potential is there.

Ebele (eh-BELL-ay) befriended boys -- a taboo in Nigerian culture, even in the large, modern city of Enugu where she lived. She sneaked off to wear Western clothes and makeup, changing and washing her face before going home.

Ebele was also fiercely willful, says Chibundu, who lives in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, with her husband and young son. And so Ebele's mother, hoping to calm her down, pushed her to marry an older man.

"Where we come from, at that time, parents told you what school you could go to, what time you could be out, who you could see," Chibundu recalls. "It was not easy to put your foot down and stand up to your parents and say, 'This is the life I want to lead.' We don't have the independence that you have in America."

Ebele's mother encouraged her to marry Victor. So did a great-uncle who, because Ebele's father had left her mother when she was very young, was a father figure to Ebele. Despite her own misgivings, Ebele married Victor in Nigeria in 1992. He was 40, she 22.

"You have these dreams when you're young to marry the husband that you want to marry," Ebele, now 35, says. "And I had that dream, too. I said I wasn't going to marry someone more than five years older than me. But you know, this wasn't the case. A lot of family opinions were involved."

The Achonus' marriage was troubled from the beginning. Like many abusers, Victor took an obsessive interest in his wife's behavior. He accused her of sleeping with dozens of men. Ebele says she never did so.

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