5-6-2013

After my incident in community meeting I turned things around at the table. No more little games. As I began to see my weight creep higher and higher I started refusing supplements though. This was my most familiar custom. As I had sat in the quiet room at Johns Hopkins two years earlier, I was now sitting at the dining room table at Sheppard Pratt in 2009 from 9:30am-noon, or 2:15pm-5pm because I refused to drink my supplements at those times. Not only did one have to sit at the table for hours upon end but one got what was called a “replacement tray”, for the next meal. This barbaric tray took the place of what we had chosen ourselves; it also had extra calories to “make up” for the calories we missed. Many people didn’t even bother with the replacement tray. I went ahead and ate the tray about 50% of the time. I had a calculated that it would still have been fewer calories than consuming all my supplements and the regular tray. My logic was so twisted though. Anyone who thinks they are going to be discharged before they reach a weight that the doctors are satisfied with is out of their mind. The process of gaining the weight is just so troubling though. The good thing about Sheppard Pratt was everyone was going through it together. Even the people who didn’t have to gain weight; everyone was facing their own demon square in the eye.

The first week at Sheppard Pratt labs are drawn every day. The second day they took 7 or 8 tubes of my blood. I was shocked that they were taking that much blood out of me. They were basically checking every possibly chemistry in my body to make sure I wasn’t going to die. Sheppard Pratt does a phenomenal job at monitoring medical things. Even though they are a psychiatric hospital and not a medical hospital they do everything they can. I am thankful to everyone from all the Psychiatrists all the way to every last mental health worker that took care of me. Believe me, it was not an easy job. Working with eating disorder patients is extremely challenging I am sure, because at their sickest they are manipulative and sometimes mean. It takes special people. I got close to lots of people like I always did. There was someone there with wireless head phones and an IPod (no wires allowed). This patient and I would listen to the same songs all day. Every time I hear those certain songs I think of Sheppard Pratt. I recognize now that I was sick, sicker than I recognized back then, but I was not the “sickest”. I am by no means comparing myself either, but the point I am trying to get across is that I witnessed the atrocities and the realities of some of the worst eating disorders I ever seen. Most people imagine people with eating disorders to be small, beautiful, and “perfect” like. That is not the case. Eating disorders are ugly, gruesome, and in some tragic cases deadly. I met people who had been in a coma and near death due their eating disorder. I met people who had to learn to walk again because their muscles had wasted away so much. One event in particular will stick with me forever. On one of my admissions at Sheppard Pratt there was an elderly female patient who was just being admitted. In all reality she was not that old, probably in her 50s, but the woman I saw looked like she was in her 80’s, she was using a walker and I thought she was about to die. I was so shocked by the appearance of this woman that I was talking to another patient about it. Later on that day I realized that this lady was someone I had known years earlier at my first admission at Johns Hopkins. I just kept thinking that this lady looked like she needed to be in the Intensive Care Unit or something. I was afraid something was going to happen. The next morning I saw something happening as we were all getting ready to go from the bedroom area to the milieu. I found out that this poor woman’s stomach and intestines had reacted too strongly to the small amount of food she put in it the night before. Her body was literally unable to handle the food from all the years of starvation and so her bowels became incontinent. The nurses had to scoop this crippled lady out of bed and call the paramedics. It was a terrifying story for me to think about. She went to the medical hospital, and I just waited for her to come back. But she never did. So if you thinking that losing weight and being anorexic will make you pretty, attractive, or happy I urge you to think again. I don’t think being crippled and sitting in your own feces is beautiful or attractive at all.

During my 2009 stay in Sheppard Pratt they moved the Partial Hospital Patients to their own separate room (in which it still to this day I believe). At some point I was hearing that I was going to be starting PHP. This was new to me, because my first admission in 2006 I didn’t do PHP, in fact inpatient had been cut way short. I had done days upon days of “day hospital” at Johns Hopkins but this was different. I was also learning that my insurance now paid for PHP. It had never done this and my parents had always had to pay out of pocket. I later learned that my dad (being a ranked military officer) wrote a letter to the Governor asking for better insurance coverage of eating disorders for our insurance. Well I think the Governor got the letter. I thought that was pretty cool. My inpatient stay at Sheppard Pratt was longer than usual this time, and so my Psychiatrist ended up arranging for me to meet with the movement therapist on individual basis, (for some extra therapy). I got to do some lite yoga with this therapist which I thought was really cool. What I liked best was my individual therapy sessions 2-3 times per week. I have to say most if not all the therapists I had at Sheppard Pratt have been great. So have all my Psychiatrists. That’s why Sheppard Pratt is ranked the 6^th best hospital in the country for psychiatry. I honestly do not have an experience at any “residential” eating disorder facilities. My insurance does not cover them unfortunately. From what I hear residential facilities take place in home like environments rather than hospital like environments. They are usually less “strict”, than Sheppard Pratt from what I hear. I think those places are absolutely fine and I wish I had had access to them. I am still thankful for Sheppard Pratt though, because unlike “residential” programs Sheppard Pratt can handle severely medically compromised patients. Someone would have to get stabilized at a hospital and then go to a residential program, to be “medically stable”.

After 10 weeks of being inpatient at Sheppard Pratt it was time for me to go to PHP. I was anxious about the transition, but it was comforting to know I would be on the same unit, eating the same food, and having the same therapist and psychiatrist. I would just be staying at hotel at night; with my dad instead of my mom this time though. I was a little uneasy about this part because my dad was going to be way stricter than my mom. I was definitely going to have to drink that ensure plus at night, with him watching. A few of the nights he actually drank an ensure plus with me though which helped.