The End

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything new on here. I’ve posted a few drafts lately that were written long ago with their corresponding dates, but nothing posted or drafted here represents how things are. I’m not going to bother catching up. Instead, I’m starting over with a new URL. I’m still mulling over new handle ideas, but at this point, it doesn’t exist. If you’ve followed me and would like to see where I go from here, comment, and I’ll email you when I figure it out. 

Thanks for reading.

Three Years

Three years ago, almost to the hour, I stopped purging for just over a year.

I stopped.

And then I started again. And it’s been a fucking nightmare. I forgot today was the day until somebody I met at Rogers posted something marking her own three-year anniversary. She entered treatment on the same day I stopped purging, and when I saw what she posted on facebook, I froze. I searched the archives of my computer and confirmed it. Tonight was the night.

I remember. It was gnocchi. I was so bored eating it that I didn’t even finish it all before purging. It was when I lived in my first apartment. The toilet clogged to easily to accommodate my purging, so I used the garbage disposal instead. One of my kitchen chairs was permanently parked in front of the sink, so I could stand on it, bend over, and effortlessly empty my stomach down the drain.

I couldn’t tell you what was happening around me, what the weather was like, what I was wearing, or how many times I purged that last day. I just remember it was gnocchi. It was gnocchi, because I was craving the gnocchi I’d had on our Europe trip several months earlier. My first bout of bulimia ended with gnocchi.

I lived on coffee for the next two days, completely terrified of purging again. I remember being in this hyper-productive, focused mood. I remember sitting on my living room floor the next day with my sewing machine and blue coffee cup, finishing the cover for my papasan chair.

And then the next year happened: I finished high school, moved to college, met the closest friends I’ve had in a long, long time, and it must have scared the shit out of me, because I relapsed.

One of my doctors in the hospital later said to me: Something in your life changed, and that is why you relapsed. It made sense, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what it was. I had friends, family, money, secure housing, and a 4.0. Maybe that’s what changed.

Glucose and Bulimia

My latest nutrition appointment lit up a new lightbulb for me, and I wanted to share it with anybody who might find it useful.

We were discussing my latest ER visit, and she decided to pull up my labs. There was all sorts of interesting stuff in there, but what really stuck with me was that my glucose level–no matter what time of day, usually in the evening–was almost always in the 70s, sometimes 80s. Translation: of course I feel like I’m going to pass out in choir. And of course my body is urging me to eat shit that will make me feel guilty. It needs sugar; it demands I eat carbs. (http://diabetes.webmd.com/blood-glucose?page=3)

My labs from my last inpatient stay at somehow are online in MyChart, and my glucose there–first thing in the morning–was 102, after four days of meal plan compliance.

I know we all talk about how staying on a meal plan prevents binges, etc., but I’ve never actually talked to anybody about it in terms of glucose/blood sugar.

Long story short, we make it physiologically nearly impossible for ourselves to stop the binge/purge cycle when we don’t recover from purging with by eating something to stabilize our blood sugar immediately afterwards. We do the “start over tomorrow” shit, but this is exactly why that barely ever works. We need those nutrients ASAP.

The following pieced together some of my questions and observations about my own bingeing/eating/purging pattern. It explains why sometimes, I feel extremely shaky after purging, and sometimes, I don’t; it depends on what I binge on and how hard my blood sugar crashes after purging. It explains why, when I binge on protein-dense foods like greek yogurt and cottage cheese, I feel differently during and after, compared to when I binge on the stereotypical binge foods society places in all those lovely textbook photos.

If you have access to online databases of studies, super. But even the end of the abstract sort of gets to the point: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8032348

It’s basically the science behind this: http://christablack.tumblr.com/post/5897433922/the-science-behind-bulimia-anorexia-overeating

Anyway, it makes me really curious about managing binge urges during recovery via heavy monitoring of glucose levels throughout the day. Now that I know where my blood sugar is personally supposed to be (Rogers level or higher). I’m tempted to buy a glucose monitor and see where it’s at when I want to binge, and see if I can “suspend” the urge for an hour or so by eating something in accordance with what the reading would tell me to (low: carbs, normal: protein/fat), ultimately stopping the binge.

Has anybody else ventured into this concept before? I can’t seem to find much about the specifics of glucose levels in bulimics, especially in the midst of the binge/purge cycle.

Disclaimer: I am absolutely not claiming to have the education to be very confident about anything I just wrote, so don’t take my word for it; it’s just a hypothesis.

Back To School?

School starts in about a month, and I’m having doubts about whether or not it’s right for me to go back.

Last semester was…difficult–definitely the worst I’ve had in college. I had a 3.94 going into it and wound up failing a couple of classes. My school has the option to apply for retroactive withdrawal under the presence of acute medical conditions, and while I have two exceptionally supportive letters written by doctors, I’m stuck on writing mine.

It shouldn’t be a challenging letter to write. My writing about myself is the easiest I do, and the expectations of the letter are clearly outlined. My psychiatrists have already mapped out the timeline of my hospital, ER, and outpatient visits as well as the state of my health. I don’t have to prove anything; I just have to explain.

It’s not hard, but I’m struggling. If writing this simple letter is this much of a challenge, how can I reasonably expect myself to be able to enroll and succeed in classes?

At what point do I know I’m ready? I’ve figured out what that point is in the opposite situation, but from here? I’m stuck. I’m trying to be responsible about this. It’s easy to be cautions, but being reasonable is a different story.

Your Blood On My Hands

August 6, 2009

I am not your sister. No. Because sisters don’t yell at you about white slips of detention for being late and bad grades and not doing your homework. No, sisters don’t spend hours on the phone fighting for insurance so they can spend more hours driving you to find self-acceptance every week. No, sisters don’t hold your head still while you lay helpless on the cold floor seizing with warm blood all over their calm hands and make sure you take your medicine so it never happens again. No, sisters don’t beat their weak wallets for different kinds of food and clothes as you change sizes because you can’t decide who you like better and shoes without holes because they can’t get you to stop dragging your feet or wear the right kind when outside is sad like you are. No, normal sisters don’t take care quite like me.

I am not your parent. No. Because parents don’t swear with you about the ignorant and unaware kids at school who don’t realize how good the bad fight at home was last night. No, parents don’t complain about how much homework they have because they didn’t do it when they should have even though you couldn’t anyway and feed the monsters instead. No, parents don’t keep you up late with text messages and drive around wasting gas and cry the same tears as you. No, good parents don’t rely on their children like I rely on you.

I am not your friend. No. Because friends don’t keep you from seeing real pictures and real words on Facebook or in frames or in scrapbooks. No, friends don’t say words to each other like I say to you and you say to me and when they do, friends say sorry the way you do not and friends do not say it is stupid when you say everything hurts inside. No, real friends don’t treat each other like this.

I am nothing when I say I feel and I am something when you want and I am everything when you need to blame.

But I’m never anybody just because, and just because is right now. Right now at this very moment is when I need to know that all the caring and comforting and confiding has a pull somewhere on your heart that bled on my hands.

And I don’t.

 

Never Going Back Again

It was during November of 2009. I drove my grandparents to the opera that afternoon, and while they watched the show, I was free in Madison with my grandfather’s camera. After wandering around for a few hours taking pictures of leaves and shit, I came upon this scene. I was in disbelief; it was like someone created it specifically for me to find. I’m not a believer in signs or fate, but this scene was surreal. I could feel it–like a warm latte cupped in cold hands. In that moment, I knew; there was this wise, hopeful feeling within me that a life of recovery for me did exist, and all it took was this image to pull me back into that space. I kept a copy of it on the cover of my recovery binder, and it was within a week of capturing this photo that I stopped purging for just over a year.

Yes, I did relapse. That hope managed to slip away from me, somehow; but I found it again. The symbol is different this time. It’s a live, breathing human instead of a shiny, 4×6 piece of paper. I can’t shut this symbol away in a dust-covered album on the bottom of my bookshelf. Hopefully, this means it can’t slip away as easily.

Late Afternoon

The feeling started about an hour ago. I was sitting at Barnes & Noble reading books about introverts and housekeeping when Dania called me back from the hospital. I’d left three messages with people at the hospital trying to figure out if I’m going to be readmitted to partial, so I was relieved to see it was her calling; however, I was not relieved when she told me it would be two or three more weeks before there would be a spot for me.

I can’t say her answer was surprising, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t disappointing to hear. My discharge from partial was sudden and scary, and I want to go back.

There’s this awful and overwhelming feeling that washes over late in the afternoon, usually on the days when I have nothing structuring my day. I do okay in the morning–the standard latte and oatmeal from some coffeehouse or another. I’m a morning person. I’m not in pain, yet. My face isn’t contorted with sadness and it doesn’t hurt to hold my head up. I read or write or wander around stores until I start feeling sick, which is how I know to eat again. Lunch involves a fair amount of contemplation. Today, I decided that I was going to have a piece of the spinach artichoke strata at Barnes & Noble, but when I got there, it was too much. I defaulted back to my oatmeal.

Now it’s about dinner time, and I’m stuck. As I write this, I’m sitting in my car in the back of the B&N parking lot, trying to process how to occupy myself for the next five hours until I fall asleep.

Five hours. And ten more tomorrow.

I’m lonely. Despite being surrounded by cars and birds and books and people and food and life, I feel as though I’m in some sort of solitary confinement. I have this sense of exhausted pent-up energy but not enough strength to do anything about it.

I’m just stuck.