Why women feel trapped in abusive relationships
It was a telephone call that stabbed me in the heart.
Her husband was at it again. He was drinking. She and the kids were terrorized. He took her car keys, locked her out of their bank account and threatened to kill her. Her young son tried to step in to protect her, but she protected him from the blows. Her teen daughter was in a tearful rage, concerned that her mother would be brutally hurt — again. The drunken, deranged husband told her and the kids to get out. Yet, she only had $2 in her purse and no car in which to escape.
How could she leave? But why would she stay?
I love this young woman dearly and she is the victim of domestic abuse and violence. I am frustrated and heartsick about her situation, yet I feel as helpless as she does. She finally realizes that the situation is hopeless, but she can’t seem to get herself out of it. Previously, the husband, in another drunken rage, threw her down a flight of stairs and broke her leg. I was done at that point, but she was not. He apologized, professed his love and promised it would never happen again. She stayed. He lied, of course.
At one point things got so bad that she and the children fled to my home. I had an attorney friend come over and talk with her and explain the consequences of her staying in such a violent relationship. We also, again, provided her with options for her and her children to find safety and peace. Other women friends came over and counseled her, offered support and tried to convince her not to go back to the chronic abuser.
After 10 days, she gave in to his nonstop pleading and returned home. The abusive cycle started all over again. She said she had to go back for her children.
Domestic violence — sometimes called intimate partner violence, or domestic abuse — is a major problem in our world. According to Futures Without Violence, an organization dedicated to helping prevent violence against women and children, one in four U.S. women has experienced violence by a partner at some point in her life.
Just last week in Chicago, a man fatally shot the female doctor who was his ex-fiancee, then in a rage also shot and killed a police officer and a hospital staffer.
On average more than three U.S. women are murdered by their partners each day. About three-fourths of people who commit family violence are male. According to Futures Without Violence, intimate partner violence is more prevalent for women in the U.S. than breast cancer and diabetes combined.
sider: While recovering from a bone marrow transplant in 2013, she completed the equivalent of a full marathon over several weeks of determined walking through the hospital halls.
She’ll be back for this year’s SJMM on Dec. 1, a returning hero — literally so, raising money through the St. Jude Heroes program as part of Danny’s Dream Team, a running team of survivors.
This time, she’ll step up to the 10K. She’ll be commemorating the 10th anniversary of the diagnosis that brought her to St. Jude, a 14-year-old Louisiana girl who loved to dance and told her doctor she didn’t want to hurt any more.
“10K for 10 years,” said her mom, Katey, who will run alongside Hillary, continuing the journey they began together all those years ago.
‘Send me to St. Jude’
After Hillary was diagnosed with Bcell acute lymphocytic leukemia in 2008, it could be said her treatment and care at St. Jude were beyond successful.
That’s because she was able, through studies in the St. Jude School Program by Chili’s, to keep her education on track and eventually graduate as high school valedictorian.
She even continued her dancing, thanks to creatively-timed chemotherapy treatments that enabled her to clog with her team at a national competition.
“I thought that was just a cool thing about St. Jude,” Hillary said. “That’s a neat testament to how they care about treating not just the disease, but the whole patient, and the family. I think that was special for my parents, too.”
“By the way,” Katey said, “she’s not mentioning that they won at that national competition.”
And, after 33 months of treatment, Hillary’s cancer was in remission.
Then came college, freshman year, and a sickness she didn’t want to believe was serious. Was it walking pneumonia, she wondered; was that sluggish feeling just the “freshman 15”?
By the time Hillary got herself checked, the situation was dire and the diagnosis uncertain.
“Just send me to St. Jude,” she told doctors in the ICU of a local hospital. “They’ll take care of me.”
She was sedated and life-flighted to St. Jude. When she awoke from nine days in a medically-induced coma, Hillary was told the bad news: She had cancer for a second time. It was T-lymphoblastic lymphoma, a subtype of nonHodgkin lymphoma.
There was good news, too: The mass in her chest had already shrunk by half, thanks to some quick work by St. Jude doctors. Hillary’s cancer sequence — Bcell acute lymphoblastic leukemia followed within a year by T-lymphoblastic lymphoma — was rare.
Only two other people in the world had it, both in Germany, and St. Jude tracked down how they were treated, and how they fared, to help formulate a plan for Hillary.
The treatment was successful, and even rather uneventful, except for “that whole coma thing,” Hillary said with a survivor’s sense of humor. By the spring of 2013, she was back in college, taking maintenance chemotherapy.
But then, at a subsequent checkup, her platelet count was “kind of low” — not alarmingly so but enough to warrant a re-check the next week. Still, Hillary wasn’t worried, even when she started running a fever. It was finals week. She wrote it off to stress.
Cancer doesn’t strike three times, right? But the leukemia had returned. She needed a bone marrow transplant.
‘I bet you can’t walk a marathon’
“I was hysterically nervous going into the transplant,” Hillary said. “We all were, Hillary,” said Katey. But the time spent recovering from the bone marrow transplant would provide some of Hillary’s fondest memories of St. Jude.
She remembers Mario Kart® tournaments with nurses, and the nurse who’d dance with her when blood had to be drawn in the middle of the night. She remembers watching “every Adam Sandler movie ever made” and “the entirety of ‘The Big Bang Theory.’ ”
And with the bone marrow transplant floor sponsored by Tri Delta, she was forever reminded of all the sorority does for St. Jude, from the tens of millions of dollars raised to the dresses donated for patients to wear at St. Jude Teen Formal. It’s a sorority to which Hillary, and her mom, would later become honorary initiates.
So many memories, then. So many moments that made recovery speed by.
“And we had a physical therapist come in every day,” Hillary said.
“That’s sort of where the marathon came in.”
The marathon, yes. A full 26.2-mile marathon, Hillary-style.
“They encourage you to walk, as much as you can,” she said. “We figured out 11 laps around the floor was one mile. So I made it my goal to walk 11 laps around the floor every day. Some days were bad, so I couldn’t do it. But most every day I tried to. And if I walked, I was going to walk 11 laps. I wasn’t going to do anything partial.”
So when a doctor challenged her -- “I bet you can’t walk a marathon while you’re up here” -- it was game on.
Hillary’s last day of walking, with 26 miles down and .2 to go, she rounded the last corner -- with a mask on her face, and an IV pole trailing -- to see a finish
‘I’m one of you’
She’s 25 and healthy. She’s a PhD student, and her area of study — pharmacokinetics, which focuses on the movement of drugs in the body — was inspired by her St. Jude experience.
She’s battled knee problems — in 2014, following surgery and unable to run, she was pushed on the 5K course by St. Jude Hero and fitness professional Jay Cardiello — but reports she’s physically up to the challenge of a 10K.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I teach dance twice a week, and run. Yeah, it’s great.”
And as she arrives on campus, she knows the emotions will hit. She’s ready. If it’s like last year, she’ll recall her patient days, when she used to think “Man, I wish I could run” and “Man, I wish I could dance.”
She’ll think of friends who didn’t survive. And she’ll look up at the Chili’s Care Center, thinking, “That’s my room. That’s where I was looking out at people running by.”
It will all come rushing back in that heart-swelling, half-mile sweep through St. Jude.
“Just all the memories from being in treatment and being on campus,” Hillary said. “And realizing that you’re healthy enough to run through the campus, and having all the current patients lined up along the side.
“It’s like, I want to stop and be like, ‘I’m one of you. You can do this, too, one day. You’re going to be OK.’ ”
David Williams is a writer at ALSAC, the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. He worked as a journalist in Memphis for more than 30 years.