Support Groups and HelpLines

TW: sexual assault, suicidal ideation

Week 6: This past week was rough, yet also somehow still beautiful too.

I guess that’s just life.

I canceled therapy due to my exhaustion. I think I also might have canceled it as a way to give myself a buffer from feeling with such intensity as I did last week. Though, typing that out it seems clear that falls under the category of exhaustion too. I just didn’t have the energy to fall apart last week.

Wednesday I attended my first virtual support group for sarcoma patients. While there I shared that I was struggling with how much to share with our 25yr old – I don’t want to scare her but I also don’t want to infantilize her either. The responses I got confirmed for me that I have been leaning into infantilizing more than I wanted. After group I called and asked her directly how much does she want to know. 

Turns out she wants to know it all (pun intended because she, after all, 25).

Spelling out leiomyosarcoma, telling her things like it has a 60-70% recurrence rate… 

It was awful.

I want to be the one reassuring her everything will be ok, but I can’t do that with this. The best I can give her is reassurance that I’m going to fight to stay here as long as I can and there is plenty of reason to hope that’ll be for many years to come.

I didn’t share the 5yr survival rates for stage 2. I am tentatively/currently staged as 1B and I don’t need to frighten her even more. If that area of concern on my new vaginal cuff turns out to mean I’m actually stage 2, we’ll deal with that then.

Friday marked 11 years since my body was violated and my mind shuttered off and shattered.

I thought somehow I wasn’t being triggered by the anniversary this year. I got excited and high fived my husband the week prior. But the week of arrived and my body began remembering, that old inky fear began etching it’s way through my veins again.

I wonder if my body will always remember that week, that day, that horrid night…

Friday noon, anxiety had begun solidifying into panic, every inch of me was coiled tightly in anticipation of an event 11 years now past that still lives in my every cell somehow. It’s beyond cruel that it happened, and so, so much crueler that I live haunted by it while that man probably doesn’t even notice the date as it passes him by.

I gave myself the grace of medication this year – Ativan spaced throughout the day to keep the full panic and possibility of flashbacks at bay. Thank goodness for Ativan. It is the way I’m able to say I’m 19 months sober. It gives me that space, that solace and buffer, that too many glasses of wine did, but without the damage or addiction.

When I think back to 2018, that 5th anniversary where I sat in a doctor’s office admitting I was afraid I was going to hurl myself down the basement stairs just to find freedom from the memories and flashbacks – that version of me isn’t someone I think could have been facing down this cancer diagnosis with hope. That version of me was in so much pain every moment of every day. My God, I’m so grateful that version of me stayed here and fought so hard to find her healing journey so that I get to be this version of me now.

If you’re struggling to stay here, please reach out for help. It can get better.

Love,

Kat