By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post
Kathylea Wolf has an overwhelming fear of leaving her apartment.
She only leaves to go to doctor’s appointments and once a month to go grocery shopping with her mother, and sometimes the anxiety is so intense she can’t even do those two things.
Even those trips can be excruciating. She looks around corners and carefully plots her way through aisles to have the least contact with other people. She has memorized stores so she can spend the least amount of time in them. If she hears a couple fighting, she freezes and goes numb. She starts saying she is sorry repeatedly even though she is not involved in the fight. She becomes terrified if she hears a child screaming.
She won’t even go outside to pick up her mail.
Kathylea, 43, is a survivor of years of physical and sexual abuse from the time she was 3 years old in addition to domestic violence as an adult. She has PTSD and suffers from agoraphobia, severe anxiety, panic attacks and night terrors.
Kathylea has applied for a service dog that she hopes will give her the confidence and stability to regain her independence and take back her life. But on disability, Kathylea does not have enough money to pay for the dog. Her insurance refused to pay for the dog, so she needs $3,500 to pay for the dog and another $2,000 to travel to Concordia and stay two weeks for the training.
Kathylea has been on the waiting list at CARES of Concordia for two years. She is hoping to have the funds by this summer.
She has started a GoFundMe page in attempts to raise the money. However, Kathylea’s isolation means she has no friends. As of Tuesday morning, she had only raised $30 toward her goal. Her GoFundMe account is listed under Kathylea’s name under Medical “PTSD trauma service dog needed.”
Kathylea had a dog before that helped her with her intense anxiety. His name was Stormy, a Burmese mountain dog. Stormy was not a certified service dog, but she did have him trained to help her through her intense anxiety. She would take Stormy for walks in the park, and if Kathylea became startled, Stormy would help ground her.
“He gave me comfort. He gave me something to concentrate on other than the people,” she said. “He could tell in an instant if I was starting to heighten. He would nudge me. If that didn’t work, he would leap on me. I had him on- and off-leash trained. He would turn and walk away, and if I didn’t follow, I would lose my dog. He had me trained as well.”
However, Stormy became so sick she had to put him down.
CARES has placed more than 1,400 dogs in the last 25 years for people with a variety of disabilities. This includes service personnel and rape and domestic violence survivors with PTSD. Sarah Holbert, CARES CEO and a trainer, could not speak specifically about Kathylea’s case, but discussed other examples of dogs the organization has trained for trauma survivors.
People who have suffered traumatic situations can be triggered to have flashbacks by everyday noises or sounds. For a veteran, this could be fireworks or a car backfiring, Holbert said. In that moment, the person is taken back to that traumatic moment in time. They freeze and are unaware of their current environment. Holbert explained this can be very dangerous for a person in public.
The dogs are trained to nudge the person in attempts to help coax them back to the present. For a person having a panic attack or night terror, the dogs are trained to provide gentle pressure, nudge them or lick them. Most of the dogs CARES trains for this type of service work are Labrador retrievers, due to their calm and friendly temperament, Holbert said. The exact training for the dog, however, will depend on the needs of the client.
CARES maintains a foundation that helps defray the cost of training the dogs. The national average cost for a service dog is $18,000, but CARES’ average cost is $5,000. For more information on CARES and its foundation, see its website.
After Kathylea’s dog Stormy died, she became more secluded, was more fearful and had more night terrors. She sleep walks, and often wakes up with cuts and bruises.
She became homeless for a time in 2012, before finally landing a place in state subsidized housing in Hays in 2014. At that point, she stopped going out.
Kathylea also has intense panic attacks, and Stormy helped comfort her during times when she had these attacks. She said her heart pounds, she hyperventilates and she cries uncontrollably. Kathylea described an anxiety attack.
“There’s an elephant that sits on my chest,” she said, “and then your skeleton is trying to vibrate out through the top of your head.”
Stormy gave her something else to concentrate on and comforted her.
“I could just sit there and smooth his face and look into his eyes,” she said, “and it was very nurturing. He was there for me, and you could see in his eyes that it hurt him to see me like that.”
Kathylea’s high anxiety came from years of physical and sexual abuse. Her stepdad sexually abused her and eventually involved her in sex trafficking. He kept her quiet by threatening to sexually abuse her younger sister and force her into prostitution.
Her mom’s next husband was physically abusive and his son molested her.
“That was the first time I started sleeping with a knife under my pillow,” she said. “When I informed them about it, they wouldn’t do anything about it, so I ran away when I was 15.”
After this Kathylea was in a series of violent relationships. She had two children by the time she was 17.
Her last husband was extremely violent and controlling. She couldn’t have friends. She wasn’t allowed to go to a doctor. She was only allowed to have a job until she started to make friends or enjoy herself, and then he made her quit.
Kathylea pointed to a scar on her forehead where her ex-husband hit her in the head with a hammer, another scar on her neck where her ex-husband held a knife to her throat and her gnarled hands from him smashing her fingers with hammers.
Her son was also violent, putting her in the hospital multiple times before he was 12. She wanted to get her son psychological help, but her husband refused.
Her last straw came when her ex-husband threw an office chair at her face and missed her by inches.
“The only thought that went through my head was which one was going to kill me first,” she said, “and that is when I knew I had to leave.”
When she tried to divorce her husband, he refused, giving her the address of a vacant lot to send the divorce papers. She waited four years, before the court granted her a divorce without her husband’s signature.
Even though it has been almost eight years since she left and her ex-husband doesn’t know where she lives, Kathylea still is very fearful he will find her.
“I still live in fear of being hit by him,” she said.
She still carefully spaces the hangers in her closet equal distance apart, because he would beat her if they were not. Every item in here medicine cabinet is also equally spaced and all facing front, and even the tabs on medicine bottles are aligned as her ex-husband used to demand.
“He doesn’t live here,” she said, staring into the row of neatly spaced hanger. “I shouldn’t fear being hit or anything else, but I still live my life like he is right behind me.”
Kathylea yearns for independence.
“A dog would help me integrate into society and help me learn how to adapt to people. Inside my house, he would help with night terrors, but he also would be a companion and help me feel safe so maybe I could feel as if I was not living in that shadow all the time.
“I would like to be able to go to store on my own,” she said. “I am almost 44 years old. I would like to be able to go shopping by myself. I would like to be able to take walks around the park and start exercising and just enjoy life — go see a movie, go out to dinner, even if its McDonald’s.”
Her mother likes to go out to dinner when she is town. Kathylea can only stand to spend five minutes in a restaurant—long enough to quickly eat her food, and then she leaves and sits in the car.
“My entire life is ruled by absolute fear,” she said. “It is not like the fear of a monster under your bed. It is a crippling fear. I get nauseated to the point where I will get physically ill. I break down in tears. I hyperventilate. People say you have two responses to a situation — flight or flight. There are actually three — fight, flight and freeze. I have a really good grasp of flight and freeze. I would like to find my fight.”
Donelle Jordan, 92, a resident of the Parsons Presbyterian Manor and a former resident of Cherryvale and Erie, died at 3:30 p.m., Saturday, January 20, 2018 at the Manor.
