Here is an excerpt from my memoir about my struggle with Anorexia and my recovery from the disease. It was devastating and yet, hopeful. It gave me a new approach on life, and I hope if will help others.
Prologue
October 19, 2006
Hunched over, I wrap my arms around my jutting ribs and shiver down the hall of the Emergency Room. Careless and oblivious nurses, interns and doctors pass me like a ghost, not realizing or caring that I had been in one of their rooms. After waiting in that room for the doctor for over an hour, and on a stretcher in the hall for an hour before that, I was released with a diagnosis that had nothing to do with my symptoms or with my true illness. When she finally came in, she could barely stand to look at me, never mind listen to me when I tried to tell her what was wrong. My blood burned and heart raced, beating so fast I thought that eventually, it’s going to have no choice but to stop. I truly thought I was having a heart attack. And while waiting, I wanted to call out to someone, but all who kept passing the door were nosy people chatting away, and if I cried “help,” I was afraid it would be with my last breath.
I continue to walk, each slow step a reminder that there is still a little bit of life in me, but I don’t want to risk anything. I have never been so conscious of the real feeling of living before, even though I don’t feel so alive. Maybe because I was so close to death, I kept making note I am alive just in case anything weird starts to happen, so I can let someone know, and maybe this time, they will listen and save me.
No, I think, I need to save myself.
The cheery nurse at the desk by the door says “goodnight.” I give her a weak smile and use my whole body to push the door open. Already frozen in the cool California night air, I see Sam’s car pull in the ER driveway. I let my fragile body drop into the car, my bony spine aching against the backrest. I thank her, feeling like a burden—as if her first ER experience with me wasn’t bad enough. As if having to live with me isn’t bad enough.
“I can’t believe they aren’t admitting you,” she says.
“I know,” I tell her, and I mean it. I don’t want to live like this anymore. Afraid to live because I might die. “They barely looked at me and wrote it off as anxiety.”
I press my hand against my heart to keep it warm from the cold. There isn’t much protecting it, and it needs all the help it can get.
“I really thought I was going to die in your kitchen.” I can’t look at Sam. “I didn’t think the ambulance would get there on time. Then all I could think was, ‘what if I never see my family again?’”
I start to feel sick and tap my feet to get some blood pumping. Once I find my voice, I tell her, “I really don’t feel well and I know something’s not right.”
We were already out of the hospital lot and at one of the many stoplights in Santa Monica. “They should have admitted you and had you on I.V. fluids and a feeding tube,” she says, somewhat shaky. She pauses. This snarky, brave, funny, bold, brash, courageous woman pauses and looks to her side window, then shakes her head and says straight to me: “I know you don’t want to hear this, but I think you’re anorexic.”
The light turned green.
Part I
In Patience
“Just when the caterpillar thought the world was about the end, it became a butterfly.”
-
Renfrew: First Day
January 5, 2007
I never thought I would be at a treatment center for eating disorders. Yet, here I am, meeting with a therapist, nutritionist, psychiatrist, doctor and nurse and telling them each the same exact story about why I am here. I thought they were supposed to give me all the answers.
My sister Kelly, two years older than me, drove me down from Connecticut to New Jersey, where we picked up her boyfriend Tim and they both took me to the Renfrew Center for Eating Disorders in Philadelphia. Not as scared as I expected to be, rather, I was shocked that it was my sister who took me to be admitted. She was the one, out of all my family, who seemed most in denial of my illness.
Something changed when she got there. Seeing me perhaps ready to enter “food school,” as I call it, or maybe noticing the other “sick” girls, brought her to the reality that yes, I have an eating disorder, and I don’t know how to get out of it. Her little sister, always the overweight one, had truly almost died of Anorexia. Going to Renfrew was my one chance for survival.
Kelly and Tim wait around all day while I go through the admissions process. Finally, it’s time for them to leave, so I walk them out. I say “bye” to Tim first and thank him, then turn to my sister.
She is crying.
I start to cry.
“Why’d you have to do that?” I say through my sobs.
“Are you gonna be okay here?” she asks. With her gentle hug, my bones throb as her hands touch me.
“If not,” Tim interrupts, “call me and I’ll come get you.”
“Thanks,” I say, and laugh. “But I know I need to be here.” I do. I want to get better, almost as much as I want this cruel disease.
I turn back to my sister. “Thanks for bringing me down here.”
“I’ll send you some comfy clothes, and a blanket. I know how cold you get. And call me later and let me know how dinner goes.”
Dinner? Oh, how I dread dinner.
I give her another hug and stand there as they leave the sidewalk and make their way to the car. I squint as they drive away until I can’t see their car anymore. I swipe at the echo of tears on my face. Now, I’m alone. There are 40 other girls suffering inside, just like me, but I am alone. Worse to come, they are going to pull my eating disorder away from me, and it is all I have. How will I survive 28 days here? Hopefully, I will simply survive.
I turn and look back at the building—my home for the next month. It is large enough, but plain. A brick building with windows and that is mostly it. There is a small driveway and a walkway to another building where I had done most of my admissions. Larger rooms spread off of it, and I could only guess that is where we have groups. “Groups,” they call them. Groups will heal us.
When I first spoke with admissions, they told me about the vast acres they had. I
thought I could walk, exercise in the fresh air. A few seconds later, any physically
fit expectations were squashed. As it turned out, us eating disorder folks were
told we’re too “weak” for strenuous activity. We can only walk the stretch of the
sidewalk and back. Once. If we do it twice, that is called “over-
Missing my sister already, and my mom, dad, brother and even my eating disorder, I took my first step up into the building; ready to enter a world I didn’t know. One of recovery. Will I truly survive here? More importantly, how did I get here?
Chapter 2
Looking Back:
Growing Up, and Out
I always knew I was overweight as a child. I sensed I was insignificant compared to others, though I always wore a smile to hide the hurt, and it was very convincing. People used to tell me I had a nice smile. They all thought I was so happy, but deep down, beneath the layers of fat, I wasn’t. My weight troubled me. I was teased on the playground and on the bus. I was just a kid, a good kid. Should weight be all that others saw? No. But unfortunately, I found that it was.
In fifth grade, we were playing on the slide. I went up but the slide was really hot and dry so when I sat down, my legs stuck to it. I held on to the sides and shimmied my way down. The other girls laughed and said, “You got stuck on the slide!” They thought I was too heavy to make it down. I told them no, it was too hot to slide down. They didn’t forget that, and reminded me of it years later. They couldn’t let go, so neither could I.
In sixth grade, our desks were pushed together in fours, and our teacher asked us to spread them out. I pushed my desk forward and then my chair, but it got stuck on the carpet. The girl next to me said, “You’re too big you can’t even move?” It wasn’t worth explaining. Girls were my friends one minute, but when they were witty enough to sound cool in front of their friends and crack a joke, they would do it to embarrass me. Next minute, we’re all friends again. As my friends grew up and came out of their shells, I grew deeper into mine, never understanding my weight and why it was it was the focus of everyone’s attention. I was uncomfortable in my own skin. In many ways, I grew up faster than my classmates, gaining a sense of maturity about life and its cruelty. I also grew faster in the physical sense, and it was something I was never able to deal with, so I had to hide those feelings. I couldn’t let anyone know how much it bothered me.
In seventh grade, our class purchased t-
High school brought different issues. In many ways, it was a new start for me. I thought that I could finally branch out a little and there wouldn’t be the pettiness that middle school had. I signed up for the tennis team—which was fun. I met new people and was hopeful I’d lose a little weight. That didn’t happen. Despite the rigorous practices, running and the constant matches, my weight stayed the same. I reached my breaking point. I was tired of being the “bigger girl” in my class. At this point, I had many friends and participated on the Student Council and Yearbook committees. I wanted to do more, to be more. I wanted to “fit in.” I just wanted to fit—in with the other students, into normal activities, and into normal clothes.
I began skipping lunch, which had no affect on me. Even with the workouts and skipped meals, my weight wouldn’t budge. I had a better idea. My body just needed a little extra help. I went to the mall one day with some friends and we split up. With babysitting money in tow, I walked past the nutrition store a few times until I was brave enough to go in. I looked back to make sure no one had seen me.
“Do you need any help?” I heard behind me.
I jumped, turned, said “no” to the kid with the nametag and ran to the vitamin section. I spotted the weight loss products. I eyed which one looked best. I knew what I needed. I picked the one that read “all natural,” “weight loss supplement,” and promised to speed up your metabolism and to help you shed pounds with diet and exercise. I was already exercising and dieting, so this had to work. I brought it to the counter.
“Okay, will this be all for you?”
“Yes,” I urged, and checked over my shoulder to make sure I was still unspotted.
“Because we have our new vitamins on sale.”
“No, thank you.”
“Would you like to apply for a discount card?” he asked, eager to sell more.
“No. Just this please.”
“Okay, that’ll be $39.99.”
A ridiculous amount, I thought, for 20 pills that needed to be taken twice a day, but I knew it was worth the money. I tucked the bag deep within my purse and ran out to meet my friends.
I was very excited about my purchase. This was the golden opportunity to lose weight. I made sure to hide them in the back of one of my dresser drawers so no one would find them, and they didn’t.
I started taking my miracle pills, and waited for the pounds to shed.
After several more boxes of those pills, I wondered how long I would have to wait. Why didn’t they work? I even tried other diet pills. Why couldn’t I lose weight? What was I doing wrong? I was exercising, skipping meals, taking diets pill, and was still overweight. How come everyone else could eat and not gain weight? What was wrong with me?
After tennis was over, I wanted to stay active, so I joined indoor track, though it wasn’t as intense as tennis. I had gym second semester, but that also brought about reminders that my weight wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t good enough. After all, in gym class, it’s your body they judge you by.
As we all lined up in a row, one by one, the gym teacher took our weight. The
boys and girls in our class would stand around to see what everyone weighed. Torture.
Embarrassing. They made comments that I should try and lose a little weight. Didn’t
they understand that I was trying? I was usually close to last during the mile and
2-
There was the day that the gym teacher took the girls aside to do a body-
She did one girl, and said, “Now see, she doesn’t look very thin, but she doesn’t have a lot of body fat on her. It’s a lot of muscle.”
I couldn’t believe that she was commentating on everyone.
She got to another girl, and said that she was just great.
Then she got to me. I seized up.
“Relax,” she told me.
I barely lifted my shirt, and then sucked in my belly. She placed the cold contraption on my skin and then squeezed it, trapping my fat and judging me based on a number.
“Whoa,” she said. “That’s not good.”
“I know,” I whispered.
The other girls looked away.
Mortified, I wanted to cry, but wouldn’t. I hated myself and I hated that they did that. I hated that everything depended on your weight or body fat, and that was all people saw. I hated that because there was another Nicole in my grade, someone once distinguished us as the fat and the skinny one. I knew which one I was. I hated living in a body I couldn’t understand and didn’t appreciate. I felt trapped. The more I kept these feelings in, the more isolated I became, and also, the more vulnerable.
I tried to eat less, especially with friends. If they already saw me as fat, I didn’t
want them to think I pigged-
***
It was my sophomore year of high school that I grew a couple of inches, and the lengthening was good for my image. It stretched out my weight.
One day at tennis practice, an older girl said to me: “Have you lost weight, Nicole?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I loathed any question that regarded weight.
“You look good,” she told me. “Not that you didn’t before, but…you were pretty chubby last year.”
I turned my head.
“But you’re such a pretty girl. You look great now.”
I wasn’t sure if I should take it as a compliment or not. Knowing that my weight had stayed the same and my height had only gone up didn’t make me much happier, but if my image had changed in the eyes of others, it must be some improvement.
The rest of high school remained the same. I gained a little more weight, but did come out of my shell a bit, and stayed active in school activities. My weight was still bothersome, and the damage it did to me mentally would prove to have a significant effect on me in the future. The seed was planted at an early age that my weight was not the “right” weight. It is hard when you hear all those voices that touch you deep within. People don’t realize how what they say can haunt you so much. Weight adds so much pressure to a kid. When people see you, they see one thing first—what you look like. If you’re heavier than the norm, they are not as accepting. As I got ready to go to college, I had many hopes that things would be different, and I could start a new chapter in my life. I was wrong.
Chapter 3
Renfrew—First Meal
Tray Level
Starting out here, I am on the first level of eating: Tray Level. That means myself and the other girls on “Trays” line up like animals and wait to be called in for dinner. When we enter the small dining room, our trays are all set up for us and have a menu with our names on it. We sit next to someone different each meal.
I search the room desperately trying to find my name when one of the counselors’ calls me over and points to a tray. Spaghetti. Figures, doesn’t it. A girl who hasn’t carbs or anything other than fruit in so long is now faced with a pile of pasta and cheese. I don’t know how I, or my stomach, can handle it. Will my body be able to process it?
It looms at me and looks like something that should be in a nursing home. I feel sick. Each item is covered: the plate of spaghetti has a lid, a bowl of watery peaches has plastic wrap over it, and a plate with bread has wrapping over it as well. My cup is turned over. I look at my menu. It reads: Nicole R. That’s me, all right. On it are several selections. I wonder who made these menu choices for me? I guess I’m stuck with spaghetti and watery peaches so I must eat it.
I take off the lid and one of the girls, Amy, stops me. Her hand is raised in the air.
“You have to wait for a counselor,” she tells me. “Raise your hand.”
Is this middle school? Like when you had to raise your hand to be dismissed from the table. Does that mean I can leave?
I raise my hand and the counselor went to Amy first. I watch in amazement.
Carol, the counselor, takes the menu and looks at Amy’s plate.
“You don’t have your cheese,” she tells her, and walks away for a second.
“Damn,” Amy says. “Didn’t think she’d notice.”
“What’s going on? Is she like, ‘Inspector Gadget?’”
A couple girls giggle, but Carol comes back, then plops a plastic cup of shredded cheese on Amy’s tray. She checks her menu again, twice, like Santa Clause, then takes her lid and plastic wrap, and trudges over my way.
I am frantic, and hopeful, that I have cheese.
“Hi,” I say.
“You’re new, right?” Carol asks. She seems so tall. Maybe these chairs are short. They do that in some places, to make you feel insignificant, and give the other person a power trip. I already feel insignificant. You win, Carol!
“I came in this afternoon.”
“Welcome. Menu?”
I pull the menu out from under my plate, and then brush off a bit of spaghetti that has stained it. “Sorry.”
“You need to remove your lids and wrappers by the time I get to you, ok? I know you’re new, but that’s how it goes. Remove those, then check your menu, make sure you have everything, and then you can raise your hand.”
So much to remember just to eat a damn meal! Maybe it wasn’t worth eating after all.
I hurriedly unwrap the nasty peaches and hard as rock bread, then lift the lid to the spaghetti. I lay eyes on it at last. So much spaghetti.
“Good job. I need the plastic cap to your cheese container too.”
“Oh yay, I do have cheese!” It was hiding behind my plate. I take off the top and hand it to her.
“Enjoy your meal, Miss Nicole.”
“Thanks.”
I look at the other girls, already eating. Amy rolls her eyes at Carol.
“It’s such a weird process, but once they know that you’re doing well on Trays, you get to move up to ‘Fix Own,’ where you can pick your own menu and go through the line.”
“Much more freedom,” adds Jackie, another girl, who hasn’t touched her food yet, but instead was reading from trivial pursuit cards. She notices that I have noticed.
“It relaxes me before I eat. Calms my anxiety.”
Amy interrupts. “Yeah, sometimes we do ‘20 questions.’ Takes our minds off the meal.”
“But don’t forget,” Jackie continues without looking up from her cards, “we only get 45 minutes to eat, and tonight’s your first night….”
“So you don’t need to finish it all. But starting tomorrow, you will. Or…”
“Supplements!” The girls all ring out.
“Shhh!” Carol hushes.
I whisper across the table. “What’s a supplement?”
“Ugh,” Amy says, fork flailing about while spaghetti drips off of it. “That’s the deal here. They make you eat everything on your plate. I mean everything. One time, this girl Margaret forgot to use her second packet of Maple Syrup with her pancakes, so she had to drink it. But trust me, that’s better than taking a supplement. They are so grody. It’s better to just eat. I guess that’s how they get you to do it, but one way or another, they’re gonna get calories in your body.”
“Ladies!” Carol howls. “Just a reminder. No food or calorie talk while eating, or at all.”
“Whatever,” Amy says. “What else do any of us have to talk about?”
She was right. That was all we knew. I finally feel comfortable, knowing I was surrounded by people who understood me. I settle into my chair, ready to make my attempt at dinner.
Or maybe not.
The plate glares at me like a gun. “Eat me or die.” I know I have to do it. I pick up my fork, swirl it around a little, and bring it to my mouth. Just do it, Nicole! I place the mangled spaghetti in, chew fast, and swallow. To my surprise, it doesn’t taste that bad, but I can’t admit that. The hard part is, after one bite, I am full.
My life has been controlled by Anorexia for so long. I want to eat, but I know what the food will do to me. The thought, the feeling of food inside of me, I can’t have it. It destroys me. The food crawls within and I can’t have it win over me. I can’t even know it’s there. If I am clean of the food within, then I am pure. There is nothing better than pure. Pure is what I wanted with my eating disorder, and these monsters were trying to take that away from me. The pieces of spaghetti inside are already destroying me.
They want me to give up my eating disorder, but they don’t know what asking me to give it up will do to me. It’s like asking someone to give up their passion. Like asking a writer to give up their pen, or an artist to give up their paints. My eating disorder is an art form. Like an artist, I don’t have any real control over it. It’s a gift, in a cruel, disgusting way. It’s as if the only thing I am good at is my eating disorder, and to want me to give that up…how could you ask such a thing of me? What would be left of me? What would I be without my eating disorder?
Part of me wants to eat, for several reasons. First, that’s why I’m here, to eat and get my body healthy. To get my mind better. To prove I can do it and I’m not afraid of food. Second, though I’ve been so scared of it for so long, I do like food. I always have. Which scares me too. I may fall back into that trap of eating too much.
I struggle with the spaghetti. It is globbed on the plate. Pasta, sauce and mounds of cheese. I pick my way through it, nauseas with each bite. The girl across from me, Linda, gets my attention, and gives me a bit of wisdom: “I know it’s hard, but it’s going to make you healthy, Nicole.” The words came from another resident, but could have come from an angel. It was what I needed to hear.
She was right. I was so unhealthy. I don’t like the food, yet I must eat it. I have to take a different approach. My body and mind need a different approach. The food, though hard to get down, may not be easy to accept as something I need or want, but my body needs it. If I have to treat it like medicine, so be it. Food will make my body and mind healthy. I feel disgusting, but I have to realize it is going to help me. It is going to bring me back to life. I so very much want a life again.
Not just the food, but also my inpatient time will make me healthy. The people I meet will help to make me well. Learning about myself will make me stronger. These people and this place are here to help. Exploring the darkness and depths of my disease will make me healthy and free.
So, pasta here I come.
I pick up my fork, and ate my spaghetti. After I did what I could, the other girls at the table congratulated me. It may seem strange to be congratulated for eating a meal, but when you have gone so long without one, it is our natural response. They knew how hard it was. I felt full, sick and guilty. I repeated the words—it is going to make me healthy. Had I been alone, I would not have done that. If I had to eat that meal on my own, I would have been in tears. The genuine support and compassion of the other girls was something I had never experienced. They know the difficulty of that first meal in treatment. Not only that first meal, but any food when you have been scared of it for so long.
They looked at me and saw a girl who walked into this place, just as they had, not knowing what to expect, quite unsure of how she had gotten there, but who wants to get out of the prison she trapped herself in. We are all in this together.
I look at them and see tremendous strength and wonder how they can be so courageous to finish their meals while encouraging me at the same time. I want to be that strong. I’ll be surprised if I get there, but hope I can. I know it will take time and a lot of hard work reliving every step on the path to this place.
Chapter 4
College:
First Purge
My ascent to college from high school reinforced trouble with weight more than any other time. There’s that old myth about the “Freshman 15,” that I didn’t really believe. I knew that some people gained weight, but since I was already a bit larger than most college freshman, I figured I was safe. Wrong again.
As we prepared to leave for Freshman Orientation, I already knew that this was not the school for me. I thought that I wanted something tiny, being from a small town and all, but I was mistaken. Rural New Hampshire did not do it for me.
My Dad suggested I look into schools in Boston or larger state schools. I was adamant about a small school, and looking back, I wish I had listened to him. I even made the attempt to transfer schools three times, but was never brave enough to do it. I’m not sure if it was the college itself, the lack of diversity, or myself that I disliked so much during those four years, but the frustration with it all accumulated and when the four years were up, I was happy to leave.
I didn’t fit in right away. I tried out for the tennis team. Didn’t make it. I
met people, but was scared to hang out with them. I felt unwanted and undeserving
of their companionship. I remember how hard those first couple weeks were. I wouldn’t
go to the cafeteria with anyone. If I ate, I’d get something to-
My roommate, Karen, was nice, but had so many friends already. Most of the people were from Massachusetts and knew each other from high school or local high schools. She introduced me to a girl down the hall, Erin, who would turn out to be my best friend. Her roommate, Danielle, would become our fourth, and we would travel in a pack—to parties or even just to each other’s dorm room for pizza late at night.
Oh, how I loved late night pizza, snow day pizza, or pizza just for the hell of it.
Erin and I became close and we found ourselves basically living in the cafeteria when we didn’t have class. We’d grab a soda and chips, or maybe an ice cream, then a table. The cafeteria looked like a ski lodge and when it snowed, the atmosphere was warm and soothing. It was a nice break from classes and reminded us that we were “home” in a way.
We would talk about our crushes and mostly just giggle about stupid stuff. We both laughed—that is what we became known for. The giggly girls. People said they’d be walking somewhere and hear laughing and they knew it was us. She was my partner in crime.
We found ourselves in the cafeteria a lot that winter of freshman year, so much that our friend Tim designated us “Caf Rats.” We held that name with honor, just laughing at it. It’s not as if we were eating the whole time we chatted. I had finally found a friend.
All that time in the cafeteria caught up with me. While Erin didn’t mind the constant treats, it weighed on me. In my heart and on the scale.
I remember one incident when I was sick and couldn’t go to dinner.
“Well, you can’t just stop eating,” Danielle, who was a nursing student, told me.
“I feel sick, I can’t”
“It’s not going to help you if you don’t eat.”
“I’ll eat later, I have snacks.”
I won. They went off to dinner. I was glad to be sick. It gave me a chance to skip a meal, which I could surely do without.
I remember a time freshman year when I became very conscious about my weight. I was overweight and met thinner friends who went to the gym, so thought I should too. I joined the dance club, tried karate—but quit that one fast. I tried out for the official dance team, but my body was not nimble enough. Rejected.
Food became a focus. I don’t remember why, but I started keeping a journal with the food I ate and calories counts. It was minimal eating, but again that did nothing for my weight.
Days would read:
Monday
Breakfast: Nothing
Lunch: yogurt and fruit.
Dinner: a few carrot slices
Snack: some m&ms (damn that sweet tooth).
I stuck with this pattern for a few days, but it didn’t last. I couldn’t last. I was hungry. I wanted more out of food, out of life, than it would give to me. My diet failed, and so had I.
***
Sophomore year came, and with it, more problems. That was the year I wanted to transfer, and after looking at many schools and dragging my Dad along, ultimately I didn’t have the courage to do so. I became depressed. I was a Politics major, and the classes were harder than the first year. I changed my major to English.
It was that year that I tried one of the worst things—Ipecac syrup. Mostly used in children if they swallow something poisonous, it is then given to them so they can vomit and eliminate whatever they swallowed. I saw it as a way of ridding of the food I ate. I ordered it online, and was thrilled when the brown box came in the mail. My savior. I could eat dinner, take some syrup, and eliminate the food.
The first time I took it, the taste was disgusting. I chased it with root beer.
It didn’t work at first. I had to manually put my hands down my throat to help it along, but then I felt it. The syrup gurgling in my tummy, making its way up my esophagus and out of my mouth.
I threw up.
Erin was outside the bathroom.
“Are you ok?” she yelled in.
“No, I feel sick.”
This wasn’t the last time, but I didn’t use it much longer. The stain the Ipecac left on my stomach was so painful I couldn’t keep up the routine. Turns out, that was a good thing. I found out later, many bulimics use it, and it can cause damage to the heart, and ultimately death. After those few excruciating times, I was done.
***
Junior year was more about drinking than weight. The depression was still there and I tried to remove it in the form of a bottle, which only increased the weight gain. I was in a single, and of all places, in the “Wellness Dorm.” This meant—no drinking allowed. I broke the rules. I drank, sloppily, was ushered back to my room several times, and wow, did I gain weight. The most I’ve ever been. About 200 pounds. I hated myself, not that this notion was anything new, but for a moment, the drink felt good, and I couldn’t stop.
The summer after Junior year, I hit the gym at home, drank less, ate better, and lost pounds. Not much, I had thought, but when I got back to school, people commented on my weight loss. Maybe it was 20 pounds or so, nothing to me, still being big, but a compliment nonetheless. Still overweight, I knew I had work to do.
Senior year is when I truly learned how to purge. I didn’t necessarily know it was a learning process; it came natural to me.
At that point, Erin and I had an apartment with two other friends, but Erin and I were alone one night hanging out. We ordered pizza, hot fudge sundaes and made margaritas—all good. But by the end of it, I was disgustingly full. We had plans to go out, so I went to take a shower. I stood in that shower, my stomach bloated, and all I felt was nausea and a need to get that food out of me. I stuck my finger down my throat and in an instant, stuff came out.
I moved out of the shower, because it was gross to leave remnants there, and instead headed for the toilet. I was amazed at this new discovery. How just sticking a few fingers down my throat could eliminate my evil deeds. I did it again, and more came out. Again, and more, and more, and more, and finally, I sat down. My stomach had settled, and so had I. There was space now in my body and I thought to myself, if I can eat this much now and get rid of it, I can do it again.
So I did. When we went to the campus coffee shop and I got a sub, I’d go back to the apartment and purge. To the cafeteria, back to the apartment, and purge. Even when I made dinner, I’d purge. No one knew. It was my secret. So simple, so easy, yet so painful. I hated the process of it, but loved the feeling afterward. Free. Pure.
It wasn’t as if I was binging and purging, it was just when I felt full. It was a release. A way to feel better. After graduation, I brought that feeling home. After dinner, purge. Then, guilt. In college, it was okay, but when my parents were supplying dinner, the guilt weighed on me at disposing of the meal they had bought or made. How could I rid of it? They had put so much work into it. Disgusting, evil, guilty, and empty. Me and my secret—it tore me apart.
Chapter 5
Renfrew: First Full Day
I’m Short and Full
I awake to the sound of my alarm, much more early than I am used to. 5:30. Isn’t this supposed to be recovery? Doesn’t that require sleep? Apparently not. Recovery requires us to strip down to our undies and climb into a thin gown, then go into the hall and wait for our name to be hollered. What a wake up call.
I do the drill, put on my lightweight gown, close it tight around me, and wait on the benches with the other girls. I can’t help but compare myself to them. She is skinner than me, and so is she, but no, she isn’t. It is a game here, and we all know it.
“Andrea,” the nurse calls, and one girl gets up, holds her gown taut around her, ribs piercing through. The bones in her arms stick out as her loose skin hangs over it, while her elbows seem like rocks between it all. Did I look like that?
“So,” I ask, to anyone who will answer. “We do this every morning?”
“Every morning,” Amy, the girl from dinner, replies, “for the first week or two, until your vitals are normal. Then it goes to three times a week, then two…then hopefully, you’re outta here.”
“Hopefully. So what do they do in there, and why these nasty gowns? It’s freezing!”
“Yeah, they’re doing construction right now, doesn’t help,” she informs me, as we watch carpenters walk by us, each shivering at the sight of them. No one wants to be seen practically naked in a gown, especially those with eating disorders, insecure enough. But especially not those who have been sexually abused, like several of the girls here have.
“They take your vitals,” Amy continues, “And be prepared for Gatorade.”
I hate Gatorade. What does she mean?
“Next?” yelled the nurse.
Shit. That’s me.
I gather my gown around me and wander down the hall, looking around at the front desk and all the things I hadn’t noticed so clearly before. It is still surreal where I am. I turn the corner and find myself in a small room.
“Scale,” she orders. What bedside manner.
I hop on, afraid to see the number.
134 Pounds. The scale gleams at me. Up two pounds from yesterday.
Up 20 pounds from my lowest. At the height of 5’9, I figure that should be enough, but they were still pushing me to be more, in the weight of the “average” range. At least 10 more pounds. Fat. I gained so much while I was home. I want to be little again.
She takes my height and to my surprise, it’s 5’8. “I’m 5’9,” I told her.
She re-
“I’ve always been 5’9.”
She has me sit on the table. “Chances are,” she tells me. “You shrunk a bit.”
I laugh a little, until I realize she is serious.
“Most people with Anorexia experience bone loss because of malnutrition, vitamin deficiencies, especially calcium, and lack of estrogen. When was your last period?”
Let me think. It’s January…. “June,” I say.
“So you have Amenorrhea. That absence of a period can be dangerous, especially to your bones. We give you calcium supplements and plenty of milk here, but we recommend you go for a bone scan when you get home.”
“Is it permanent?” I ask, while I pat my shrunken head.
“You won’t grow, but you can prevent further damage. You could have osteopenia, which is on the way to osteoporosis. Osteopenia is treatable. Osteoporosis, no. That’s why you need to be nourished.”
“I know.”
“Now, lay down.” I do, but still have a hard time with this whole shrinking thing. Even though I have always wanted to be shorter, this wasn’t the way to go about it. Well, there was really no way to go about it.
She checks my pulse and it turns out I’m “orthostatic.” Who has ever heard of
such a thing? Not me, surely. Sounds like some awful, incurable disease. Really,
it was just the results of a simple test—they took my blood pressure when I was laying
down, then waited a minute, then took it when I was standing. If there is a twenty-
Also, I must drink a giant cup at lunch and at dinner. These people think Gatorade can cure everything. You stub a toe—“hang on dear, let me get you some Gatorade.” Headache? “Oh, Gatorade will cure that.” Miss home? “Gatorade!”
Gatorade became the running joke, and actually made the drink go down a little smoother.
After weights and vitals, nervous of the calories, I dump the other cup in the sink back in my room. I watch the contents of my second cup of Gatorade slide down the bathroom sink. I was worried, like I might get caught, but I did it. I then had two options—I could go back to bed for some more sleep, or get ready to start the day. Breakfast was not until 8:30. The reason for early vitals is so that all the staff would be ready. Again, what about the patients?
I chose to climb back into bed. As soon as I did, Laurie, my 18-
Caitie, the 13-
I can’t sleep. As soon as Laurie is out of the shower, I run for it. Our room is a suite. Three beds in ours, then a hall with a bathroom, then another room with 2 beds. It’s like the Brady Bunch room. However, and this completely confused me at first, but the other room has two girls who suffer from Bulimia, so the whole suite is on locked bathroom.
“What does that mean?” I had to ask the counselor, after I had rushed to get her because our bathroom door was locked and I really needed to pee.
“We have to keep the door locked so that certain residents don’t use their symptoms…”
Symptoms?
“When those residents need to use the bathroom, we open it for them, but have to leave it open a crack, just to be safe. But since you are not on locked bathroom, just come and get us and we’ll open it for you. Just make sure it’s locked when you’re done,” she explained.
I couldn’t believe that the counselors had to stand outside the bathroom, with the
door cracked, while girls peed, or worse, poo’d. I found out that symptoms were
all those things that us eating disordered gals did—binged, purged, restricted, over-
The counselors come into our room at about four in the morning to unlock the bathroom so that we can get ready for weights, vitals and shower. It’s nice I guess, but after that, it is locked. Sort of a pain in the ass, but I can deal with it. I know that all of us are suffering from something, and it must be worse for those dealing with a locked bathroom and who have to be supervised.
I get showered and ready for breakfast. Of course, when I get there, my tray wasn’t there. Just my luck. It literally was not there. They tell me that I can pick off of the menu, which brings even more anxiety—what would I pick? I was really having a difficult time, but then they found my tray. A relief and terror all in one. The result was: ½ raisin bagel, peanut butter, yogurt and raisins. That’s like a whole day’s meal. Or, what used to be a whole week’s meal.
It was a lot to handle and I haven’t had a bagel in so long. Besides that, the toasters weren’t working, so it made it even more unappetizing. I ate the bagel, with peanut butter on it, and became insanely full.
I sat there and ached for a while.
“Just do it or you’ll have to drink a supplement,” Amy tells me. Amy, the sweet
16-
I felt so full, but I did it, and then felt sick.
Whatever happened to “eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full?” I guess
those rules don’t apply when you’re re-
After breakfast, we have Community Meeting, where all of the girls get together to check in and bring up any issues going on. Then we split into smaller groups for our consults. I express my concerns about eating—about stopping when full, about eating just to eat, and to get it done within the time limit. They gave me the same old spiel.
“You have to adjust to the food and your body has to become comfortable with what you need,” they tell me. Lame.
Lunch is worse. After the groups, I put my things back in my room, and wait with the herd for our meal. I can see through the window, and it glares back at me: a sandwich, chips, veggies, fruit and cake.
I say to my roommate, Laurie: “A whole sandwich?”
She replies, “You can’t do a whole sandwich?”
“No, just a half, barely. And that was up from a quarter.”
We go in, I find my tray, and to my surprise, and luck, I am still on Meal Plan A, the standard—when you’re first admitted—so I just have the sandwich, veggies and the cake. No chips! The cake I can do, because I like my sweets. The lettuce and tomato that came with the meal, I put on my sandwich—chicken curry with raisin on raisin bread. Who has ever heard of such a thing? Gross.
Needless to say, I have a really hard time with the sandwich. It is not something I really like and it fills me up. So much food. The girls see me having trouble and are amazing and supportive.
The ones at my table all chime in: “Just eat it. We’re all full, but you have to do it, you don’t want the supplement.” Then as I ate, they say,” Good job, Nicole, you’re doing great!”
It was so nice. I did end up finishing, but felt so disgusting, guilty and gross. One of the girls told me that I “kicked ass.” Hey, I did, didn’t I?
At the end of the meal, you of course have to get checked off that you ate it all, and when Carol came to check my tray, she says, “Good job. I know you were having a hard time with this one.”
It was nice of her but I still don’t understand the point of gorging yourself, eating things you don’t like and within a time limit. It seems like it creates a negative association with food for me, which only stirs the eating disorder more. I want to be able to look at food in a positive way and learn to enjoy food again, and when it’s gross and there are time limits, I don’t focus on the food, I focus on finishing so I don’t get in trouble.
This re-
It is scary. I spend much time in the nurse’s station as they too are worried about
my reaction (physical—everyone here has a bad mental reaction to the food.) There
are worries about my kidneys and blood sugar, and they did tests, which ultimately
came back okay. My body is just having a heard time metabolizing the food because
it hasn’t seen it in so long. It’s in a bit of shock. Like, “what the hell are
you putting into me?” The nurse’s tell me it’s all part of re-
I hadn’t realized that while I thought I was being “healthy,” eating my fruits and veggies and working out, not only had I been doing damage to my body, but also it would hurt to undo the damage. Eating disorder treatment is a painful process, mentally and physically, but a process that is extremely needed. That is why I can’t do it on my own. Because once the pain starts, I probably would make it stop—by not eating. I have to learn to push through the pain. There has to be some relief on the other side.
People here tell me it will get better…then it will get worse…then better. I always heard it will get better, and I guess it has to when you are at your lowest point, but to have it get worse again is pretty discouraging. The worse part I guess is supposedly good. It is when you really delve into those difficult issues and it means you are working hard in your treatment to give up the eating disorder. It is hard and a hell of a lot of conflicting emotions. Hopefully, in the end, it does get better. I am so looking forward to the better.
I talked with both Mom and my Dad. Mom was more concerned with my health problems, being a nurse, and Dad was more concerned with how I was feeling. He said that he understood my concerns but that the center must have a good system if they do so well. I told Dad how hard it was for me to see such skinny girls and think of how I was before and he said: “What, almost dead?”
We were talking about all I had done to myself—why I was orthostatic and dehydrated,
due to the laxatives and diuretics, and he said, “it’s amazing you’re still alive.
I might sue GNC.” I know he gets kind of heated when talking about all the damage
I did to myself, and he even brought up the long-
He told me: “I know it’s gonna be hard, but it’s only the second day.”
Which is true, I’m still so new to this.
I talked to Kelly last night and she told me it was early and things will get better. I’ll get healthy. I told her about the night with the spaghetti and how I struggled, and what that girl said to me, and it made me think about what my friend Jason said to me: that’s the end goal, to get my health back, to get my life back. I want that so bad.
Kelly and I had a good talk and I’m surprised by all of the contact we’ve had. It
has been nice to talk to someone. I’ve been writing in my journal non-
