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.

The Needle Returns to the Start of the Song...

... And we'll all sing along like before...
Goes the song.

Irritating when your internal MP3 is stuck on the same track and no matter how hard you shake it, it won't stop. Trying to get away from it is just about as effective as trying to go on holiday without your head. And don't we all wish we could do that at certain times in our life. Take enough hallucinogens and it's possible, but they're not exactly cost effective and the insurance you'd take out is ridiculous.
No.
No way around it but to play enough music to flush this one out of the system.
This particular musical ghosting is a song by... (I pause, not for literary impact, but because my memory function is compromised by malnutrition, although, it could just be that my powers of recollection are as shite as they ever were)... 
Where was I? Okay. (Breathe) The music... 
It's a song by Del Amitri (who for some unknown reason, I always confuse with Dire Straits). An especially depressing number, aptly named, 'Nothing Ever Happens'. For those who like to listen, go ahead.
Indulge.



I guess it's the theme of repetition that lends the song to my worn out inner ears; and for good reason.
On Monday, I retrace my tracks to the unit where it all began. Back to the beginning.
March 2011, the agonies of which, I captured on this very blog.
Yep.
That's right.
Monday will see me standing outside the gates of hell itself.
And to be clear, it's not that nothing will have changed, because I have. My illness has. My way of thinking has. Three years of various treatments, including seven months as an inpatient, and rather a lot of medication, have put me on a markedly different rung of the ladder.
What is hard, is that it's the same hole. The same darkness. And, pretty much the same distance to the light.
Hence, 'we all sing along like before'.

I want this to work... which means that I will have to work. Very hard. 

It will be bearable, though it won't feel it.
It won't kill me, though the process of recovery will involve the slow death of the illness, so it will feel like it.


In all the darkness, I must somehow manage to fix my eyes on a light I will not always see. 

In order for recovery to take place, you have to believe that, just as there is always a sun and a moon, there is a new life beyond, and there is a different person behind, the illness / addiction. 
The courage it takes to make this leap of faith is immense and for me personally, I don't know if I can sustain it. 

Life Outside...

I want to be honest.

Although nothing in me will tolerate the conditions of returning to the unit, I am, quite frankly, finding it very hard to manage the process of re-feeding.

It's tough going from the moment I wake up.

Impossible not to compromise on the calories I'm supposed to be having.

My weight is down to 5 stone, BMI 13 point something... maybe less.

I'm going to do a meal plan for tomorrow so I don't wake up and torture myself in the middle of the night with it all.

Bombshell

At around midday yesterday, unit staff announced the decision to reintroduce two much dreaded 'high energy' supplements into my meal plan.

The room around me blurred and whitened as my mind whirled into the shadow flecked vortex of spinning panic and dissociation.

Today I sit in relative calm.

The pain and the panic whirl around me but not within.

I discharged myself from the unit.

I'm not entirely sure how I will manage

but

failure is even less of an option that it was last week or the week before.

So:

The work of rebuilding continues.

A lot tougher and a little lonelier, but it continues nonetheless.

At the moment I am shuffling through rubble, feeling little more than dazed as I survey the extent of the wreckage and try to keep breathing through the swirling fusion of chalky dust and stone.

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.

One Balloon At A Time

A girl floats above the earth, looking down at the ground with a mixture of longing and terror.
She is frightened of SO MANY THINGS.
Things that are UNNAMEABLE because to speak them may bring them into being.
To name them all would be exhausting.
And besides, some of the fear doesn't have a name.
It's just there. Just because.

The girl is kept suspended by a big bunch of balloons.
Each balloon has something written on it. Some element of her illness and of the fear which may lie behind it.
The balloons keep her safe. They keep her looking at the world without quite being in it/ part of it.

A Christian lady I met on a course I recently attended had this in her head as she prayed for me.
She told me that God was handing me a pair of scissors and that he was gently encouraging me to cut just one string...
She told me that I'd still have the other balloons so I wouldn't plummet to earth.

I thought about this a lot.
It reminded me of British graffiti artist, Banksy, and his brilliant image of the little girl holding the balloons.

Yesterday I drove into the unit turning the picture over in my head.
At lunchtime, I took the scissors and cut the balloon with the word 'Jacket Potato' on it.

It sounds absurd... but my fear of carbs is just one in a long list of foods which is holding me in this illness.

I should note here that, as promised, cutting the string attached to that particular balloon, has not made me fall to the ground, a puddle of flesh.
It caused huge fear afterwards, but I'm still very much suspended.

For now, I'm still fairly 'safe'.

I do know though, that I must work hard to seriously challenge this illness.
And that the best way to do it is to use the scissors.

Just one balloon at a time.

Words...

... don't come easily.

One of the (very many) unpleasant side effects of anorexia and the re-feeding process is constipation.

I know.

Not something that makes an attractive reading experience.

Nevertheless, a rather uncomfortable reality for me right now.

(One I deserve, no doubt)

I mention this because, as I try to sit down (which requires an untold degree of discipline given that standing up burns more calories) and write something, ANYTHING, about how things are looking for me (or... inside me) at the moment, the medical definition of the word 'impacted', paints pictures in my head.

The ever reliable Websters Dictionary defines the term as:

1 a : blocked by material (as feces) that is firmly packed or wedgedin position impacted colon>
b : wedged or lodged in a bodily passage impacted mass of feces>impacted fetus in the birth canal>
2 : characterized by broken ends of bone driven together impacted fracture>
3 of a tooth : wedged between the jawbone and another toothimpacted wisdom tooth>

... And all three of these seem to perfectly describe my current mental, emotional and spiritual state.

I feel the agony of the growing mass, bulging and folding against the walls of my mind. I feel the acrid sting of sobs, pushing painfully against the base of my throat and the heavy, heavy blur of words that won't attach to each other, trapped as they are, in the indistinct, impacted shit.

My communication channels been impacted for weeks now.

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.

A Day in Life at The Unit. Part 1

Thank you all for continuing to support my journey on the roller. I guess it's quiet right now.

Or rather, the screams are stifled much of the time.

I'm very tired and lacking in energy.

Re-feeding is an incredibly upsetting experience and I'm already dreading tomorrow (a 'weigh' day in case I haven't put on enough weight and have to face the prospect of even more food being added to my meals or snack times in the unit.

In keeping with the desperately 'split' nature of Anorexia, I am equally dreading the possibility that I may have put weight ON.

However, I write this after a day where I feel as though I have barely had a moment without stuffing some artificially sweetened / low fat / low - as - I - can - get - away - with foodstuff down my gullet. (And yes, technically speaking my meal plan is supposed to exclude all such products but hey, it's the weekend.)

I have actually put on a few pounds. This, a response to last week's blood results indicating the fact that my liver, heart and kidneys are struggling; my white blood cells are decreasing and my protein intake is way too low.

How this should be happening now, at a point where my diet is more varied than it has been for months, seems to beggar belief but my doctor explained that there is often a bit of a 'lag' with these things.

The guy who runs the program we follow at the unit (who, for reasons I will explain at some point, I will henceforth refer to as 'The Godfather') offered me the option of potassium supplements or 2 bananas a day.

Needless to say, the bananas are not a feature of my new heart-sustaining regime.

So.

Tomorrow is tough before it has begun.

Although that's not exactly positive thinking and I understand that I should possibly reframe that thought in a CBTish kind of way.

Still.

Here's how it's going to look on a purely practical level.

I'll get up early, shower and make myself look as 'well' as I possibly can without looking like one of those orange make up ladies behind the Max Factor / Elizabeth Arden counters at Debenhams.

I'll chop an apple or small pear into small slices and eat it painstakingly slowly regardless of whether I am early or late (and despite panicking that I am, in fact, the latter).

I'll blare my way through the beautiful countryside at a speed which is as far above the limit as the car in front will allow (OK... so I know this is not a good way of doing things but I have a weird obsession with never allowing myself to be too late), twitching and 'dancing' as much as I can to burn off calories.

Arriving on time, or even half an hour early, I'll drive around looking for a non existent parking space until I am about 5 minutes late.

Getting into the unit, I'll sign in and go through to find the girls I've grown to love so much.

It's Monday and the anxiety of the weigh in is thickly palpable. I'll dig out 'Sticker of the Week' and they'll all choose a cute, puffy animal sticker which they will either wear or stick on the new week's food diary. Some of us crowd around two clipboards, one of which contains a table headed 'Lunch' and the other 'Snacks'. We have a selection to choose from for the day. Girls will wander in and out as we take it in turns to go to the weighing room where one of the lovelier clinicians awaits our blustered, flustered entrance.

Once this procedure is over, The Godfather calls us to sit around in the circle and we check in and talk about our weight. No specifics. Just whether it's up or down and our feelings around it.

The group are then invited to feedback.

This goes on all morning until snack time at 10.30 and continues until lunchtime at 12.15.

Sitting around 2 tables, each with a hawk eyed member of staff, we swallow our food with varying degrees of cheer.

We are well bonded.

We are there because we want to get better. Sort of.

But there is rarely a meal where someone doesn't sit, tears running down tortured face, as the sandwich appears to be more threatening than usual.

I'll stop here because I'm so tired and I haven't been sleeping too well lately.

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.