SART

I'm hoping writing here will help quell the adrenaline rush, since what I'd really like to be doing is sleeping, but after you get paged by the sexual assault beeper, the adrenaline flows into your stomach like cold water, and all you can do is wait it out.

I was paged tonight to phone a young woman whose friend had just been sexually assaulted. The survivor didn't want to talk, but her friend was interested in some information, and what the options were. I spent ten minutes talking to her about what the centre offers, what our roles are, the time lines for our services, etc etc. Talked a bit about crisis psychology and some of the things her friend might experience over the next few days. I always think I've forgotten tons of my training, and I get paranoid that I'm leaving massive chunks of information out, but when I get down to talking to someone, letting them know how long they have before it would be useless to take the emergency contraceptive pill, or support them in making a plan for how they're going to get through the next twenty-four hours, I feel like I'm actually doing real work that makes a real difference in people's lives. If I can leave this earth knowing that at some point I made another person's life that much more bearable, or their pain that much easier to work through, then my life won't have been a stupid waste of interneting, movie-watching, and procrastination.