Finding Another Kind of Understanding : Health: Members of a Van Nuys support group for lesbians with life-threatening illnesses share their complex struggles.

Christine Anne Wolfe is a lesbian with a wide network of friends and professional associates, both gay and straight. When she learned four years ago that she had Hodgkin’s disease, a severe form of cancer, she counted on them for support.

But there were certain aspects of the disease and its emotional impact that even her closest friends could not understand.

“If you have a falling out about something with a friend,” said Christine, 33, who uses a cane to help her walk, “it might take six months to patch it up. But I might not have six months.”

Neither might the other women who were meeting, as they do every Friday morning, in a spare conference room in Van Nuys.

Kim, 31, who asked that her last name not be used, has scleroderma, a degenerative tissue disease. “My girlfriend left and I was swamped with the changes in my body,” she said. “After a while, your friends and your family max out, they can’t take it all the time.”

Sometimes, friends inadvertently make them feel worse.

“I just love it when you open up to someone,” Kim said, “and they try to make you feel better by saying, ‘Well, tomorrow you could get hit by a bus.’ ”

The women laughed. They had all been there.

“That ‘get hit by a bus’ line gets old, real fast,” said Sally Verdon, 49, who has had a mastectomy for breast cancer.

“Sometimes,” Kim said, looking at the other women in the room, “I think the only people in my life I can talk to about my illness are in this group.”

The Lesbians With Life-Threatening Diseases support group, sponsored by the L. A. Shanti nonprofit service organization, has been meeting for just over a year. Its members are few but devoted. And although there are dozens of support groups in Los Angeles dealing with issues of women, lesbians and fatal illness, these women don’t feel they fit into them.

As the name of the group suggests, it has specific requirements for membership. The women involved are the first to laugh about how exclusive they are.

“You want to feel you can go somewhere and talk where you have something in common with the others,” said Rebecca, a group member, in a telephone interview. She has metastatic melanoma and was too sick to attend the meeting. “You don’t have to worry about what some other woman might think of you, about coming out.

“On top of dealing with cancer, I didn’t want to deal with all these other things.”

A few of the women, including the outspoken Sally, did try other illness groups. “I noticed that when I disclosed that I was a lesbian, some of the other women looked like they had swallowed their faces,” Sally said.

“Out in the parking lot some of them were pointing at me and talking. I don’t know if they had never seen a lesbian before, or what their problem was.”

Sally, a Van Nuys resident who formerly worked as a barber before getting sick, is not known for treading lightly when she detects homophobia. But to avoid disrupting the group, she left it.

“These women had enough to deal with,” she said. “I didn’t want to make them feel uncomfortable. It wasn’t fair.”

As important as the Friday-morning sessions are to these women, the support group had a hard time getting off the ground. “We first tried it in 1990,” said Jeannie, a Shanti volunteer who is one of the group’s two facilitators.

The idea came from a Shanti official after a discussion about lesbian health problems at a conference. For example, it was pointed out that because lesbians usually do not bear children and therefore do not produce breast milk, they are at a higher risk for getting breast cancer than heterosexual women.

Word about the new group was spread through Lesbian News and other publications and the first meetings were held in a conference room at Midway Hospital in Los Angeles. But at most, only one or two women showed up for the evening meetings.

“We know there are plenty of women out there who could benefit from the group,” Jeannie said, “but it was a constant battle to get them to come. I think women are a little bit more closeted than gay men. There were worries about confidentiality.”

Kim said that a spirit of independence among lesbians probably also contributed to low turnouts. “Just like everyone else, most lesbians came here from other parts of the country,” she said. “Where they were, there might not have been support groups for lesbians or much of a lesbian community. They learned to rely on themselves.”

That first group disbanded after a few meetings, but the regulars, Sally and Christine, persisted in their requests that Shanti try again.

Last year, the group was reconvened in the Valley, this time for morning meetings.

“At night, these women are sicker,” Jeannie said, “and they aren’t well enough to work anyway, so they can meet in the morning.”

With Kim and Rebecca eventually joining, the core group was formed. Other women attended from time to time, but none became regulars. One woman who was attending regularly was told that she was no longer welcome.

“She had falsely represented that she was sick to get into the group,” Jeannie said. “A friend of hers told us the truth after she had been coming for a while. I think the woman needed the attention, she wanted a social group.

“But these women don’t meet to socialize. It’s to share strength and experiences and hope.”

There is a second facilitator at the meetings: Lynn Andreoli Woods, 41, who trained to be a Shanti volunteer last year because she wanted to do AIDS volunteer work, Shanti’s primary mission. But because Lynn is a night student at Cal State Northridge and available mornings, Shanti officials asked her to help with the lesbian group instead.

Lynn is the only straight person who attends the meetings.

“I worried a bit about what they might think about having a straight woman there,” she said, “but when you are dealing with the real issues, the passionate issues of life, it doesn’t matter.”

Her sexual orientation was not mentioned at the first few meetings Lynn attended. But then she met up with Sally at the gay pride parade in West Hollywood and Sally asked her, “Is your lover here with you?”

Lynn was taken aback. “I just didn’t feel free enough to say, ‘Bill is picking me up,’ ” she said. “There I was at an open expression of gay rights and I was in this reverse situation. I was having trouble with the pronoun. It was ironic.”

She came out to the group shortly thereafter. “They had no trouble with it at all,” Lynn said. “I guess some straight women might feel uncomfortable at the meetings--there is a lot of randy humor sometimes--but it’s a gift to be in the presence of that much courage and humanity.”

Rebecca’s weakened condition is one of the more serious topics of discussion at the meeting. “It has bought out the possibility that we might lose someone in the group,” Sally said.

“Since I joined the group, because I had already relapsed once, I thought I would be the most likely one to go first,” said Christine, who found out that she was sick on the same day she received her doctorate in clinical psychology at USC. “When Rebecca joined, I realized it might not be me.”

“How do you feel about the fact that you might not be the forerunner?” Jeannie asked.

Christine’s hands fidgeted nervously as she thought for a moment.

“I knew her odds when she came here,” she said. “It made me think about myself more.”

Christine was clearly relieved when the conversation turned to romance. Like doting mothers, the older women in the group quizzed Kim about a blind date she had on vacation in Canada.

“I had dinner with a Mountie,” Kim said with a laugh. “It was just dinner, it was OK.”

Kim had also recently heard from her old girlfriend. “Maybe she wants to get back together, but I just don’t think I can take it, physically, any more,” she said. Her disease increasingly saps her energy and makes movement painful. “The emotional stuff is so hard,” she said.

“It is exhausting,” Sally agreed. She, too, lost a lover during the time she was ill.

“Sometimes I think this group is really advice to the lovelorn,” Kim said, and the women launched into a discussion about people who don’t understand that when they are feeling well, they still seek romance.

Christine offered: “My ex once said about me, “ ‘One day she tells you she’s dying, the next day she tells you she’s in love.’ ”

“Like we’re supposed to ride off into the sunset and that’s it,” Kim said.

“And never date again,” Christine added.

Kim shook her head and sighed. “It’s been three years now, up and down,” she said. “No wonder my friends have maxed out.”

“You’ll probably outlive them all,” Sally said.

“Tomorrow,” Kim said with a smile, “they’ll probably get hit by a bus.”