When i checked myself in, i was so scared. i thought i'd be the oldest and the fattest. i thought i'd be the only mom with little kids. i thought only girls struggled with eating disorders. i thought i'd have my disease the longest at 28 years and counting. sadly, i was wrong on every single preconceived notion i'd had.
there are only two hospitals in my state that have inpatient Eating Disorder Units. there are 14 beds in the EDU of the hospital i was in. it's a confidential unit. only first names are used, really. my therapist and husband had intervened to ask me to check into one a month before i did. i promised to get better, try harder, begged them to give me one more chance. and so i did. i tried harder to lose 15 more pounds before being admitted. i didn't eat at all. well, i restricted to 500 calories a day, but then would exercise enough to at least burn off 750-1000, so my body was literally eating the muscles i was working. sometimes i swear i could feel it happening when i laid real still at night. when you starve your body, your mind does crazy, terrible things. i was an emotional roller coaster, up, down high and low. the pendulum was swinging more and more erratically and i was in a very dark, empty place. my mind played sick tricks. the addiction to this behavior is alluring because we crave the control, we need it to exist in our daily lives. somewhere along the line it became our coping mechanism - the singular way in which we handled all the chaos around us. everyone thinks its about the physical body. about the food. about the pressure to be thin. it doesn't start out that way. those become symptoms of something much deeper and darker. and we're good hiders. we've hidden our disease for so long. its easy in the beginning. but the deeper we fall into the abyss, the more embedded the lies become to our mere existence. they are us and we are them. there no longer lies a distinction, we don't know who we are without our eating disorder. it gains a voice and life of its own.
i had hit rock bottom when i checked in that day. i couldn't stop crying, i was bingeing and purging twice a day and not eating the rest of the time. my children were posturing themselves not to upset me, i.e. make me cry or angry. i couldn't make simple decisions, my brain was clouded and dark. i had started "cutting" for relief and that scared me...and my husband and therapist and friends who knew. and i was in real physical trouble. so dehydrated that my potassium and sodium levels were low enough to put me into cardiac arrest (of course i didn't know that until i was tested at the hospital). And i was so dizzy from the dehydration that every time i sat down and stood up, even slowly, i would go black - taking several moments to regain my sight and equilibrium. a few times i fell down even, and lied to those around me about being clumsy or something goofy. i started calling the hospitals to seek help. Doing interviews on the phone - telling my shameful secret that was literally now consuming me from the inside out. MY control mechanism that had taken over my control. controlled me. This one agreed to have me in the next morning for an evaluation. Once I did that, they wanted to admit me right away, but there was a wait list! Ha! A wait list to get a bed in an Eating Disorder Unit. 5 days they said. I begged them for sooner, i might not make it til day 5. Thank god, they called me two days later and off i went. Got there, did all the physical check-in procedures, and then my insurance company refused to admit me. they claimed i hadn't done enough outpatient work to warrant inpatient care. they often do this, especially with bulimics since we often look pretty normal, generally weighing an average amount, normal BMI, flying under the radar easily. but bulimics die faster than anorexics, generally. Heart attacks, ruptured esophaguses...you've heard me say it over and over again now. i am LUCKY!
i knew if i left the hospital that day, i'd never come back. my husband and children had dropped me off. my kids thought i was "going on a retreat to learn how to take better care of myself and be a better Mommy". hey, it wasn't untrue. My younger sibling was flying in from across the country to help take care of my children during my absence. took off work, leaving his partner to deal with all the business. It would take me a minimum of two weeks inpatient to "break the cycle" they said. I was going to miss my children's first day of school, first soccer match, swim lessons and dance classes. But i knew that if i didn't get help now, i'd die and leave them without a mommy - missing every major event in their lives and robbing all of us of a life full of the beautiful love we share. And so....i had to move forward, like it or not. And since my insurance company wasn't cooperating, i was offered me two options by the hospital. i could go home and they would work with the insurance company and let me know the verdict OR i could check myself in as self-pay (at $1200 per night) and let my Doc fight for me, with the added the ammo that i wanted to get better so much i wouldn't leave. I chose the latter.
But it wasn't really a choice. I knew if i left, i'd never come back.
at least not walking.
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