Pillars of Salt. Square One.

But Lot was so afraid he couldn’t move. So the angels grabbed him by the hand, and they grabbed the hands of his wife and of his two daughters, and they led them out of the city. As soon as they were safely out of the city, one of the angels said, “Flee for your lives! Don’t look back, and don’t stop anywhere in the plain! Flee to the mountains or you will be swept away!”  

And then God rained fire onto the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Thick, black smoke filled the air like smoke from a fiery furnace.

(Paraphrased Old Testament story - Taken from Genesis 19:25 ff )

Sometimes in life, you have to grit your teeth, set your face like flint and let the hot tears run cold.

You have to put blinkers on and RUN. Ignore every twinge of agony and crash through every hurdle of despair.

Scream if you have to, but whatever you do, DON'T LOOK BACK. Don't look at what you were, where you've come from, how you felt. Just keep running like nobody has ever run before. 

There's a point in recovery, be it recovery from an addiction or recovery from an Eating Disorder, when to look back is fatal. Just like Lot's wife, to look at what you've left behind is going to destroy you. 
In the case of Anorexia, to stop pushing through the pain barriers, to allow yourself a backward glance is to begin to slow down. Casting that quick over-the-shoulder peek, may not feel like it, but it's going to make your feet like lead, your path like treacle. And all of a sudden, it's got you. 
You were going through hell, you should have kept on going. 
Why go through halfway through hell and turn back?
That's what looking behind you will do.

Suddenly, you're so much bigger. 
You can't feel your bones. 
You can't see the ribs, the dip in the sternum, the ridge of the clavicle, the tailbone, the prominent metacarpals, the pits alongside your knees... 

And you turn
into a pillar
standing in the tunnel
you never saw through.
And there, you stay
disintegrating
grain by grain
bone by bone

until 
you 

'Lot's Wife'

are back
to the place you glanced at
Yet,
when you get there,
it's only 
a 
different
shade
of 
hell.

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. 

I'm Still Here...

... Still in the hospital.
... Still battling.
...Still wanting recovery
and...
Still finding communication very, very difficult.

However...
I am currently weighing in at 38.8kgs and my BMI is now above 15.
Although I am finding weight restoration almost unbearable, I am finding that eating the food itself is less frightening.
I even enjoy it.

I want to begin writing about the recovery process and I want to use my experiences to benefit others in some way and yet, I still have so, so far to go.

Tomorrow I get to go home for one night after twelve long weeks... Or is that thirteen?

I think it will feel like heaven, and yet, I am scared I'm gonna mess it up.

If you're still reading here, 

you are more faithful than I am deserving, and show more loyalty than this blog warrants!

It's an Inpatient's Life

I began the following post on Day 10 of treatment.
I am completing it on Day... Thirty five..?
What am I still doing here?
I wish I knew.

Day 10

Ten Days after admission and I am just getting past the numbed haze of the first few days as an inpatient in an Eating Disorders Unit. I want to be positive and strong and cheerful but in reality, there are few words to describe the abject misery of the long, closely monitored, periods of 'enforced rest', that characterise the treatment of undernourished patients.

As a newbie, I have been placed on 'Level One Obs', a nursing term meaning a patient must be 'checked on' every fifteen minutes.

Words fail to describe the torture that accompanies the lack of sleep these 'checks' entail.

Prone to insomnia, I think I managed two hours last night. Sleeping medication has been prescribed but I am loathed to use it every night, meaning that I am cultivating an unhealthy dread of long, 'every other night,' shifts. Tossing and turning, I sweat on a rubberised, wipeclean hospital mattress, under a rubberised, wipeclean, hospital duvet, tortured by unspent energy and the cruel whisperings of the relentless Anorexic voice.

I get up and shower in the wet room, cursing the ever growing pool of lather which collects around the plastic drain. I hope to be on time for the discretionary extra glass of water that is allowed in a narrow, fifteen minute window, in the mornings.

Outside the clinic room door, a queue of barely rested, skeletal patients in varying states of undress, forms. A small plastic punnet of pills is pushed across the trolley. I swallow the seven tablets in two gulps. At least this is the chance for a bit more water. (Restricted fluids is part of the treatment and they swear that what we are allocated is 'enough').

Thankfully, this is as close to One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest as this place gets.

Breakfast is at 8.30 and comes with juice, but if you complete your meal within the allocated half hour, you are allowed an 'extra' water, tea or coffee.

Two minutes over and you're fucked.

At the table, I cast my eyes around, looking to smile encouragingly at my comrades who sit, eyes cast down, pushing tiny forkfulls of fattening foods into fear filled mouths.

Cheek bones clench painfully, accentuating the grooves around their mouths as they chew on branflakes and then toast.

I haven't eaten toast for about three years.

As a carbohydrate, it terrifies me.

Day 35

I was thought I'd be here for four weeks.

Come Thursday, it'll be five.

Last thursday I reached a BMI of 14.1 and weighed five stone 8 pounds. It feels like such a lot.

I've had time to get to know the ropes a little, although, it doesn't make them any less painful to climb.

I won't continue with a blow by blow account of the days here... Suffice to say that, when you are assessed and deemed  'cognitively well enough', you are allowed to join certain 'groups' which take place twice a day, both an hour long.

Days are structured around the three meals and three snacks. Each of these is followed by a period of 'enforced rest', during which time we have pulse rates, blood pressure, temperature and sats done.

I can't fault the care here. The team are outstanding, though there are many times when I would gladly escape their attentive listening and their constant presense.

The worst thing about this place (aside from the obvious and the ensuing weight gain) is the complete lack of privacy.

The doors to the bedrooms have little windows and staff patrol the corridor at regular intervals, day and night.

I am currently allowed out for two, 'unaccompanied' 5 minute walks.

You can imagine the pace of these.

Twice a week we are woken at six for weigh in. I'm usually the first because I've been awake for hours, sweating on the rubberised hospital matress, which still makes me boil in my own skin despite the fact I have a blanket and two sheets seperating the rubber and my body.

We're spared little dignity as a member of staff stands outside the slightly opened bathroom door, waiting to listen to us pee so they know that the figure on the scales is a reflection of our 'true' weight.

No room for stagefright.

No room for cheating either, as we strip down to bras and knickers to stand on the scales.

Mondays also entail enduring one of an assortment of unhelpfully similar acronyms; a CPM.

Daunting to even the most seasoned of inmates, this requires that you sit before a selection of senior team members who feedback on your progress, sanction (or not) each of the three requests you are allowed to submit for consideration, and discuss the efficacy of your mealplan.

Mondays are rarely dryeyed days for the majority of patients.

I have all that to look forward to in the morning.

My stomach churns as I type, unable to digest the huge portion of ice cream and rhubarb crumble, unable to face the numerical realisation of my inevitable weight gain, and unable to face the impending bowl of bran flakes that lies in wait for me at nine thirty this evening.