5-19-2013

Well yesterday was a bit of a depressing entry and I admit it. I will try to make today’s a little better. The positive thing is I have lots of great friends/supporters/readers even if I don’t see you all on a daily basis. It means a lot that I can at least keep in contact with you through texting and Facebook. Without you all, I don’t know where I would be. No one knows what I am feeling more than you do. Yesterday I revealed one of my deepest darkest secrets to you all. I have been a binge eater for a while, not even a bulimic. Technically, I still meet the textbook criteria for bulimia because I “purge through laxatives”, but that has not prevented me from gaining weight, nor has it prevented my obsession and desire for – evil food. People may look at me today and see that I am a “healthy/ normal” weight and that is somewhat true, I am not underweight but I am absolutely by no means in recovery from an eating disorder at the moment. I am not anorexic but I am still struggling with a life consuming obsession with food and a pulsing hatred of my body. In fact I hate my body much more now that I did when I was anorexic. I do feel like I need help with whatever kind of disorder I have now, but I would not dare show my face in an eating disorder program the way I am now. I am horribly ashamed of the way I look, and more importantly I am mortified that I am not able to control my internal desires. Sure, the medication and hypothyroidism may have affected my current situation a bit, but I am solely responsible for the hole I have dug for myself and jumped into. A new therapist, different meds, a DBT group, taking summer classes, but there is only so much that the environment can do but I alone need to fix the inevitable problem that has been consuming me for just short of half of my life thus far. Food is still a problem for me, but it is playing different tricks on me this time. I am determined to send food and its tricks to hell one day.

I will now get back to my story of my admission to Sheppard Pratt Hospital in March 2011. I had been out of the hospital for nearly 2 years and for a period of time I thought that I was never going to be anorexic again in my life (exactly how I think now). The months leading up to that admission I bought myself a nice gym membership and started working out has much as possible. I hopped onto the old doctor style scale with familiar enthusiasm and as I saw my weight drop for the first time in a year and a half, I couldn’t think of a better high than what I felt. Week after week, down, down, and down in went. Along with the decrease in weight went a stark shift in my mood. I was getting depressed all over again, the starvation induced depression. The kind of depression you get when you walk out of school at 3:38PM in January and its 25 degrees and you think you might die before you reach your car parked near the back of the senior parking lot, the kind of depression you get when you have no one to sit with at “lunch” so you sit with a sophomore (and you are a senior), she tells you people are laughing at you because you have no chest, also the kind of depression you get when you Skype with your  dad who is thousands of miles away in fucking Afghanistan and he says you look like you are getting “skinny again”, and you say don’t worry I am not the one in war zone. (The war zone was/is my own head).

My enthusiastic therapist was even beginning to sense that something was not right with me. It’s always the sunken in cheeks and the eyes that give it away first. However my psychiatrist couldn’t have been more of an idiot. She prescribed Prozac because I was depressed and that would certainly make things better. It didn’t, and I Prozac made me more depressed (or I made myself more depressed), so I came off that and within weeks I was shipped off the Sheppard Pratt – for the 3^rd time. I really did not think this was happening for a 3^rd time. I knew in my head that 3 times wasn’t much at all, I knew people that went to Sheppard Pratt every couple months for a total of 20-25 times thus far in their life. However, I was not a “newbie”, I was a Veteran patient. I knew what to except, but I did not expect the comment made by that ignorant staff member. “You don’t look that bad, hopefully you don’t have that much weight to gain”. No I was not prepared for that, I thought it was drilled into their skulls not to make any comments about our bodies. I did have plenty of weight to gain however, 28lbs to be exact, but hey maybe it wasn’t that much. I was walking and I was breathing so I wasn’t considered that bad off apparently. I hate so passionately the stigma associated with anorexia. It seems to be unless you are a lifeless corpse in a box in the ground you still could be worse. That is so ignorant, because people with Anorexia Nervosa suffer throughout the entire illness from the day they first decide to skip dessert, until the day they fall down on the street in cardiac arrest. Also let me make it clear that all eating disorders  - Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa,  EDNOS, Binge Eating Disorder, and Compulsive Over Eating, all struggle and usually all have body image issues. You think just because someone eats cake they are fat and lazy, well screw you absolutely not! They eat cake because they have intense mood swings and emotions and they probably hate their body just as much as an anorexic. It’s just a different process, and all eating disorders are warrant for the best treatment possible.

When I arrived at Sheppard Pratt I knew exactly what to do- strip search, search of all belongings, EKG on the first day. It was all a part of the familiar ritual I had been a part of since age 13. A few new nurses, a few new mental health workers, buy oh hey there were a few patients I had known from almost all my past hospitalizations! It was like a family reunion. How grand. I met with my psychiatrist on the second day, and I was keen to inform her that I was not nearly as underweight or sick as I had been in the past. She said okay but I was still at risk of “re-feeding syndrome”.  Soon followed the customary 8 vials of blood drawn on the second day to make sure I wasn’t falling apart. I was not inpatient for nearly as long this time, in fact to my memory I was inpatient for only 3 weeks before I was moved to PHP. During my 3 weeks inpatient I had gained weight and the whole 9 yards. My therapist from my last 2009 admission was not there anymore though, which I was sad about. But a therapist is a therapist is chair is a chair is a therapist, whatever.  I was informed from the very beginning that I would be doing PHP all by myself this time. Dad was in a war, and my mom had the home duty of staying at home with the animals including my sister. Plus me going to the hospital was just getting “old”, at this point. I was 18 and I needed to grow up and I had been around the block with hospitalizations.  My Psychiatrist at Sheppard Pratt didn’t even try to plea with my mom to stay with me because it would not work. It was arranged that I would stay at the Hackerman-Patz House which was part of the St. Joseph Medical Center next door. It was a guest house for patients of the surrounding hospitals so that was where I was going to stay for the 12 hours being out of the hospital. I was so full of responsibility.

I hope this entry has helped inform you all that all eating disorder suck, even the one I am facing. I do not have “Binge Eating Disorder” actually, as I technically do not meet all the requirements. My new diagnosis is Eating Disorder Not Other Wise Specified, which I hate because it is like a garbage can label. My pride and joy anorexia label is not with me at the moment, but like I said all eating disorder are deadly, dreadful, and miserable.