On The Way To Recovery

As I drive to my place of cold

Morning sun streams
Over frosted fields

Recovery is a wing
Pierced by blades

Of winter grass.

No rest... for the Anorexic.

BMI 16.8
42 kg

This is hard.
I'm growing. More, I've GROWN. 
(Groan.    I do.)

It's getting easier to eat the food on the unit.
I'm not feeling the intensity of the agony I was. I rarely end a meal and feel like hanging myself from the shower rail (which, incidentally, is magnetic for just that reason).

Now it's OFF the unit that the problems occur.

I have weekend home leave fortnightly. 
It would be weekly if I didn't lose weight every time.
I TRY. I really do. But I panic and I walk around a lot and eat fairly 'light' meals and feel triumphant if I manage to keep my head so busy that my body 'forgets' that it has missed a snack.

Exercise remains a HUGE issue for me.

I NEED to get past this.

As I was on one of my walks the other day (I'm allowed three twenty minute walks nowadays) it occurred to me that I can restore my weight to a BMI of 20 - 25 and still be a slave to exercise, a slave to the thoughts which perpetually torment me the minute I have to sit down for a second longer than 'rest' is enforced for. 
I can restore my weight without ever challenging myself to eat pizza or drink wine or eat ice cream or pasta or ciabatta or gnocchi or avocado or any of those things that terrify me.

I could well walk out of this hospital, a picture of health; the epitome of 'normal'; cheeks glowing, hair shiny, eyes sparkling; vitamin B, C and D radiating from every pore... and still be utterly horrified at anything more than a sprinkling of carbs across my week, and COMPLETELY unable to even contemplate something like takeaway.

I HAVE to challenge myself with these foods or I will never overcome the fears I have.

And yet.

I feel helpless when it comes to even sitting in the hairdressers for a couple of hours. 
Today it nearly made me cry that I had to sit down for so long.

If I could kill this illness, I'd want to torture it first.
Torture it like it tortures me and all the girls here.

Distortion - The Extent To Which Anorexia Lies

I sit in the shabby hotel conference room, anxious for the guy whose innocent gesture has landed him a bidding price that is far, far higher than anything he can afford. 

Nobody else is bidding and my fingers are twisting themselves into tight, three dimensional infinity symbols. 
"Any advances on..." 
A grey suited, old man, wearing a felt Trilby, half rose and then collapsed in the middle of the room.

"Time... Time..." 

Time for what? 

A melodic voice in the distance

"... that time again..."

I lurch and my breath is caught and it's sudden: The realisation that I'm here, not there. I'm awake. 

Six am, in the half light of Weigh Day, and the Support Worker stands cooing at my door. 

I know I must leave the bathroom door ajar so she can hear me as I pee.

It's a long time since this felt like an indignity. 

I stumble down the corridor into the glare of the clinic room. Somehow I manage to keep shading my eyes as I peel off my nightwear.

The scales confirm weight gain.

I fight my way through a cloud of sleep - laden mist to calculate just how much.

I do, and I am not devastated. 

Perhaps I'm getting better. 

Perhaps I'm just too tired.

I pretend I'm still asleep as I crawl back into bed.

Miraculously it works. Until 7.45 when the alarm pips me back into reality.

Even as I write the word 'reality' here, I debate whether to use inverted commas, because actually, within minutes, the distortions conjured by this illness can transform your mind from a Ferris wheel, to a drop spindle for your thoughts. 

At six o'clock in the morning, I knew exactly how much weight I'd put on in the three days since my last weigh in. Approximately one and a half hours later, during which time I had done nothing but sleep, I awoke convinced that at least three days worth of weight had suddenly piled on and, were I to stand on the scales again, they would read quite differently. 

Just to make it clear: in this moment, I was utterly convinced that my body had withheld weight until one minute AFTER I stood on the scales, at which point, it suddenly and spontaneously added the pounds / kilograms that it had been hiding. 

Yes. 
These are the lengths that Anorexia will go to in order to keep its victim ensnared.  

And this is only one of the many distortions its capable of.

The fact that the mind can do this in a period of time when there has been no food intake, perhaps you can imagine the outstanding strength of some of the convictions that an Anorexic has after eating, the sheer havoc wrecked by having food in the body.

Although everyone has a different experience, I am often overwhelmed by the physical sensation of fat layering itself onto the backs of my legs and my thighs. At any given point in the day, I will suddenly be aware of this thickening of my body. I swear, I can FEEL it. I've been told this isn't possible, and yet, it's always someone who hasn't HAD the experience that tells me. Perhaps you have to have experienced feeding your skeleton, putting flesh onto bone, to feel it. 
Or perhaps it really is another of the distortion of reality... which is a frightening thought because, how will I ever know what's real and what is, in essence, a figment of the imagination. Like a phantom limb, the fat clumps on my body. I feel it and, I SEE it. 

And yet, as I do my calculations, I briefly think of the previous nights' anxiety; the conviction that I must have put on a least a kilogram (that's two point two pounds). 
I hadn't.

Can I really feel POINT three of a kilogram? 
Really?

The ugly truth is that part of my reality is almost certainly distorted.
My truth is not THE truth. 

A Post In Pieces

Again and again I stare into a murky pool of muddled metaphor and ill fitting adjectives in an attempt to find something powerful enough to describe the chaos of trying to recover from Anorexia Nervosa.

Plucking tangled fronds of slime gripped sentences that have no visible beginnings or ends... Dark words that, lifted lightwards, slide and slip heavily back into mud, resisting context and order.
Somewhere, there's a likeness between this 'independent' agony of being unable to adequately express the agony, and the quandary of being desperate to recover whilst being unable to physically complete the actions necessary for recovery to take place.
Re-feeding... This 'process' a mouth-less creature, starved to its skeleton, placed before a piece of fresh, tender meat. Driven mad by the hunger, its endless pacing surrounds the meal, carving circles in the earth.

I hold a license to eat but find my mouth has been stitched up.

Enough metaphors. 
I did warn you...


For those interested, these are the facts:

• Although I'm not in the unit anymore, I attend fortnightly reviews / weigh ins with the head consultant, a fantastically dedicated man with whom I have a very good rapport. 

• The aim is to move my weight up by following a strict meal plan. 

• The consultant's recommendation is that I return to the unit. I steadfastly refuse to do this. If you had to sit in a circle and discuss how you feel about your weight day in, day out for over nineteen weeks, so would you.

• I am managing to maintain a steady weight, although at 34.6kgs, it is still very low.

• My current BMI is 14.1.

• My ALT levels continue to be much higher than they should be. Doctors are monitoring it carefully. The nurse at my local surgery does weekly ECGs and takes enough of my blood for us to consider each other as friends. 

• I had planned to return to work at the beginning of next half term. Occupational Health, my consultant and my bosses have told me this will not be possible.

Importantly, I continue to see The Woman. 

The little house in the woods is my safest place and she is a worn piece of warm, brown leather with all the woody comfort smells of autumn fog and fir and fires.

She has been the one constant in the chaos, and although my financial situation reduces my time with her to once a week, this feels plenty enough balm for a mind  addled from trying to win a battle which bleeds deeply, no matter which side wins.  

I keep reading my flashcards (see Recovery Resources page). 

The mantras are clear and loud at the start of each day but seem to wane as the hours pass. Towards the evening, I can barely hear a whisper.

It appears that the coherence and volume of these positive statements, corresponds with the amount of food I have inside me.

I want...

I want my life back.
No matter how bad things were, nothing, NOTHING can be as bad as Anorexia.


My weight remains in limbo, my mind in hell.
I am unable to complete tasks I attempt as my brain is just too addled.


I have started taking Pregabalin, despite the fear that its most common side effect is weight gain. 
I don't care anymore.
I just want the illness to go.


I wish that I could be put to sleep whilst my weight is restored.


It occurs to me that I haven't written about The Woman lately.
I have so much to say. 
So many words in a swirling vortex - half formed ideas dance purple shadows in front of my closed eyelids in the early hours.
I resolve to write posts about the nature of Anorexia and my understanding of its relationship with anxiety and depression.
I swear I'll reply to friends, blog friends and world friends, whose words and caring constantly brush soft against my bruises.
And yet, come the morning, I haven't got the mental energy.
It's all I can do just to force the bran through my lips.


I want to go back to work.
I want to live again.
I want to eat without feeling like I'm sinning.
I want to live outside of hell.


I want to ignore the old parental adage that whispers that 'I want doesn't get'.

Hits From Reality

Things have been pretty awful. (An oxymoronic phrase if ever you saw one)

Two weeks ago I began frantically re-feeding after dutifully attending a routine fortnightly 'weigh in' at the unit, where they have insisted on monitoring me.

I hadn't quite realised how horrific I looked until I faced the concrete reality of the much feared scales. I hadn't really SEEN my sunken sockets and protruding cheek bones.

My weight had dropped below the 5 stone (70 pounds) mark again.

They told me I had a week to turn it around or... hospitalisation.

Despite my subsequent weight gain, later blood results showed that my liver had gone into crisis with ALT levels soaring.

Last Friday was a fairly terrifying of panic stricken phonecalls from the unit, my GP and the hospital. By early evening, I was sitting in A&E whilst too kind doctors apologetically eased needles into swollen veins.

No wonder I weighed light on the scales.

I wondered if they were going to bleed me dry.

Following three days of sterile corridors and needles and bleeping machines and spidery graphs and the clinging smell of industrial disinfectant and linoleum, they were satisfied that my levels had dropped and that the alarming elevation in ALTS was either due to the effects of prolonged starvation or to the delicate process of re-feeding.

I haven't been able to think straight for a while.

I'm still struggling to order my thoughts and to complete even the smallest of tasks. The painting was one thing I managed to finish, and now this blog post is another, although I haven't got the emotional strength to write about the things I want to; things that swirl in frenetic streaks through my mind, clamouring and clambering over my sleep.

There is no rest...

Enough now.

Paint For Peace

I CHOOSE LIFE

Er... About that "lighter note"...

... In all honesty, I find it significantly easier to write 'lighter note posts' when I am lighter in a more literal sense.

When I last posted I had taken almost two weeks away from the unit. One week on a trip down to the Cornish coast and a few days 'thinking time' to decide whether or not I was able to truely commit to treatment.
In that relatively short amount of time, I somehow managed to 'achieve' a comforting weight loss of four pounds (approx 2kg). Thus, with my BMI safely hovering around 14, I felt able to be a little more relaxed.
In the end though, the misery of the rapid increase in restrictive eating and the anxiety caused by the fact that I felt like a fugitive, aided my decision to return to the unit to continue the treatment.

After a couple of weeks of fairly intensive 'refeeding' (ugh! So much 'treatment lingo') Thursday's 'weigh in' revealed that my BMI is back up to 14.5. My tears though, were relatively shortlived as somehow, my brain appears to experience some miraculous kind of backlash against the anorexic desire to sabotage any weight gain through intense exercise.
For reasons possibly only known to God himself, despite the panic of being faced with jacket - potato - with - tuna - mayo lunches, and margarine sandwiches with hummus, I seem to have managed to maintain a fairly determined, positive attitude towards the concept of recovery for the remainder of the week. In fact, in another attempt at taking steps towards defeating this twisted illness, I handed in my pair of scales on Friday. As I passed them to one of my favourite staff members, I felt as though I was holding my hand against a hot iron.

The burn hasn't cooled yet and if anything, I know it will become even hotter tomorrow morning as 'weigh in' approaches.
I can only hope that time will afford some healing.

A Day in Life at The Unit. Part 2

The state of neglect that has befallen this particular pocket of cyberspace is indicative of some of the trauma and some of the inexplicable sense of exhaustion that follows the experience of being cooped up in the unit day in, day out.

By the time I get home in the evening (having first run frantically around a range of supermarkets / shops / country lanes in an attempt to 1)get some sort of exercise and 2)create some sort of sense of separation between my life as a recovering anorexic and my life as a human being) all I really want to do is disappear into a protective shell.

At the moment, I'm thanking God (and Kate and William, of course) for the second three day week; thus a break from the intense goldfish bowl environment of the unit. However, I know that come Tuesday, the brief period of reprieve is over and there can be no avoidance of further weight gain.
With no exercise, supervised feeding of high fat foods and the addition of an obligatory three hundred calorie 'Fortisip' drink, the gain is inevitable.

I could write about the splits in my mind; the constant warring thoughts; the terror of the terrible losses that grow as I gain... but it's too soul destroying to even think about right now.

I am ruled by absolute fear.

I'm afraid that I will gain weight and lose the sense of safety that I worked so long and so hard for.
I'm afraid that I will lose weight and be forced to include another bloody Fortisip in my diet.

I'm afraid that I will be on this refeeding thing forever, yet I'm frightened that I might start piling on weight at a ridiculous rate.

I'm afraid that I might not be able to get over this hideous illness and I'll never enjoy food again, but I'm scared by the physiological responses to refeeding which make me hungry much of the time and less able to resist food.

I want to get better
but i don't want to put on weight.

It feels like a no win situation.

And I feel like a hamster, stuck on a wheel that won't stop turning, so I can't stop running, so it won't stop turning, so I can't stop running... and on it goes.

Being Here

I've made countless attempts to write a post here which might somehow capture the absolute rollercoaster of a journey I've been on in the last fortnight at the Eating Disorders Unit.

So far, all such efforts have been thwarted by a complete sense of overwhelming exhaustion when I try to string more than a few words together.

Suffice to say that the experience of being stuffed full of food at far too regular intervals between 10 and 4, has been almost intolerable and I have to admit, I have tried to cheat wherever possible.

I am like the naughty schoolgirls that I so often have to teach.

Only, I'm far more fragmented in many ways.

The rest of the time is spent in the group... doing group everything.

This has proved to be an interesting experience inasmuch as the strength of bonding occuring within the group and the incredible sense of love I have felt for these girls.

Overall, despite the feeding (and because they are new to open and therefore have not set up properly yet - and so no evening meals yet) I have lost weight.

Mainly this is muscle wastage. I can no longer run or even jog.

Climbing stairs is difficult.

I will write when I have more energy.

I'm sorry that I haven't kept up with other blogs lately.

It's all very, very tiring and overwhelming.