Your heart is failing. You are very sick and we need to admit you. Cold, numb and in a nearly-catatonic state of consciousness, the doctor’s words shattered my hard exterior. Now scared and overwhelmed with guilt, I collapsed into my dad’s chest and repeated over and over and over, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I’m sorry.” I hadn’t eaten in three days.
My arrival at Loma Linda Children’s Hospital came after a year and a half of starving myself. At the time I was admitted I had been surviving, if you can call it that, on tea. The week prior, my mother – bereft over watching her child gradually becoming more and more of a corpse – tried to get me to eat a grape. Just one single grape. I refused. “You’re going to kill yourself!” she screamed. I genuinely, to my very core, didn’t believe her. Anorexia had warped my mind so completely that I truly thought I was fine. I believed that eating was what would kill me, that the anxiety of consuming unwanted calories would overwhelm every cell in my body and cause me to go into cardiac arrest. The doctor was right. I was indeed very sick.
As I was wheeled closer and closer to the ICU, the guilt began to subside and sheer panic set in. It was the kind of panic that lurches your stomach into your throat. The kind that you can feel pulse through your entire body and into your head, leaving you dizzy and your ears ringing. As they tried five – yes, five – agonizing times to get the feeding tube down my nose, the panic turned to sadness. How had this become my life? How had I become that girl with the eating disorder? I didn’t set out to become anorexic. I didn’t stop eating because I thought I needed to be skinny. “God dammit I didn’t choose this!” I cursed in my head.
After the first night, during which I probably slept all of two hours, a team of doctors came by for rounds and with all the emotion of a rock told me that they would be drawing blood every few hours to make sure I didn’t go into shock from an electrolyte imbalance. The head doctor went on to tell me that I wouldn’t be allowed to get out of bed for any reason other than to use the restroom until my heart stabilized. Worst of all, she explained that I would have a sitter. Yes, a 24/7 babysitter to watch my every move because anorexics are notorious for pulling out their feeding tubes and creatively sabotaging their health. I asked her how long I would have to be here. She said, very matter of fact, that it was up to me. It took everything I had not to tell her to fuck off. My sadness instantly morphed into blood-curdling rage and suddenly I felt the need to claw out of my skin. I needed to get out. I was trapped and I needed out.
For the first few days I ignored the food trays. Just the sight of food disgusted me. The first time a nurse placed that awful green tray on my over-bed table I nearly chucked it across the room. Each morning when the stone cold doctor came to see me during rounds, I would ask when I could leave and she would repeat – to my palpable dissatisfaction – that it was up to me. When I finally realized that meant that I had to eat, I attempted to muster the strength to take a couple sips of the tomato soup on my lunch tray. Strength was ephemeral. I leaned over and threw up over the side of my bed. My body had gotten so used to lack of food that all it took to purge was simply tilting my head down.
When a couple weeks passed and I still hadn’t been able to shit, my nurse and sitter were tasked with giving me an enema. I was mortified. I hadn’t had a single moment of privacy in two weeks and now these strangers were going to stick a tube up my butt as I lay on my side completely exposed. I had never felt more naked. I was broken. Completely, utterly broken. Jenny, my nurse, squeezed my hand while MariGrace, my sitter, stroked my head and tried to comfort me as the cold liquid penetrated my system. I had tensed my entire body so much so that the enema didn’t work, but something else happened. The kindness and warmth of Jenny and MariGrace gave me a sense of comfort I hadn’t felt in a very long time. My anger was softened by their sweetness. I consider Jenny MariGrace angels and they will forever hold a dear place in my heart.
I spent a month in the children’s hospital and another five at an in-patient clinic. Being the high achiever I was, I participated in my home away studies program while simultaneously keeping up on the corresponding AP work – work that I wasn’t allowed to receive credit for. I spent the first half of my senior year going to clinic every day, working through childhood traumas, learning coping skills and attempting to restore a healthy relationship with food. My parents will probably never recover from the debt my treatment caused them, and I will never be able to repay them for their sacrifice.
When I eventually “graduated” from clinic, I returned to school. I felt so alone stepping onto campus for the first time since passing out in front of everyone in the student parking lot. There were whispers and rumors flying around. I’m sure someone thought I had been MIA because of a pregnancy. Fortunately, I had my sister who, only a freshman at the time, became my defender and only friend back at school. I didn’t know how to be a normal high school student again. I had been through this traumatic, tragic experience and “normal” high school things now seemed like petty bullshit. I went from class to class having minimal interaction with my peers. What energy would have been put into socializing, I channeled toward excelling in my studies. I was determined not to let anorexia take my college dreams from me.
All my hard work paid off. I was accepted to my dream school, UC Berkeley, and jetted off to the Bay Area to study molecular biology. Putting myself through school, because insurance coverage for eating disorders sucks and my parents went nearly bankrupt, I worked 30 hours a week on top of my full course-load. I continued in my path of isolation and faked smiles when asked how I was doing. I began eating less and less again. I started weighing myself again, sometimes stepping on the scale three or four times in a single day. My clothes became looser and looser. I fell back into wearing sweatshirts and bagging yoga pants to hide my protruding bones. Once more, my skin became blue, my eyes yellowed and my energy withered with my body. Bruises again speckled my thin skin. Again, I was dying. But this time, I wanted to. I wanted to be free of the torment. I wanted to be at peace and not suffer. I wanted to stop hating myself each time I succumbed to hunger. Dammit I wanted to be free!
My dad came up to visit my sophomore spring break. He had planned to stay the entire weekend, so I was disappointed and confused when he decided to leave early. He had been gone all of a couple hours and I saw his picture appear on my phone. Why was he calling? Was everything OK? I answered. “Sweetie,” he said, “where are you?” I was on the treadmill, where I had been the last hour. I thought about lying to him, thought about telling him I was at the grocery store or at breakfast with a friend. Part of me wanted to be rescued, though, so I was honest. I told him I was at the gym and he asked me to call him when I got home. I continued working out for another hour and before I had even taken off my shoes, I called my dad from my apartment. He told me to sit.
After my dad explained that he’d left because my condition was disturbing and it broke his heart to see me so sick again, I lost it. The façade of togetherness I had been attempting to keep up melted away in a puddle of tears now soaking my carpet. I was the sick girl again. I was Susan Kaysen starring in my very own sequel. What the fuck was my life? How could I let my college dreams be taken by anorexia? I was supposed to be strong. I was supposed to be the good, smart, responsible one. Embarrassed by my dark truth, I lied about my reasons for leaving school. I told my advisor and friends that I was leaving because my stepmom was sick and I needed to be with my family, both of which were true, but that’s not why I was leaving. I was moving back home because if I stayed at school any longer I was either going to jump from the roof of my apartment building or let starving slowly lead me into death’s sweet release.
*****
It would be lovely for me to say that after graduating from clinic all those years ago that I had hope – hope of a wonderful future free from anorexia. Yes, it would be lovely. But it would be a lie. The day that I graduated program I drank a liter of water before weigh-in to hide the weight I had lost from restricting. The reprieve that therapy had given me from the unhealthy noise in my head was sweet but fleeting. And when the noise began getting louder and louder, I lost hope that I would ever be free. From my very first hospitalization, relapse was an eminent fate. I knew it. And I was waiting. I never believed I would be so blessed as to write my own recovery story. I didn’t believe I had the courage to gain weight and not immediately try to lose it. I didn’t believe I had the strength to live a healthy life.
Today I am proudly at a healthy weight, my diet has variety and I’m not filled with shame each time I eat. The first time I was hospitalized I did the work of weight restoration for my family. I was a minor and it was rather forced, for my own good of course. But recovering from relapse, that I did for myself. I decided that I had two choices: a) let my anorexia kill me because I was scared, or b) muster the courage to at least try and have a fighting chance at making it out alive. I've truly never been happier. I have experienced more adventure, laughter and life than I ever thought possible. No it isn't easy. Recovery doesn’t mean that anorexia is silent and that I never feel overwhelmed, that I never experience anxiety around food. My recovery means that health is a journey and not a straight line. It means victory over fear, not the absence of fear. My recovery means embracing a healthy body and allowing others to comfort me when I need it. My recovery means that this life is better than any I could have dreamed before deciding to get healthy. I have energy; I have joy; and most of all, I have hope.