Addiction and Mental Health my Story.

Chapter 2:- My battle with Anorexia

 Chapter 2- As I said earlier my first psych ward visit was a start of many. I was only there for a month managed to finish two courses in my second semester of university despite the fact I was in hospital for a month which I now see has a huge achievement but at the time I saw it as a huge failure.  I had another issue when I was in the psych ward I learned a new trick of the eating disorder trade, purging.  It still sickens me to know that the place I learned how to purge was when I was in a psych ward.   After that my eating disorder got worse mostly restricting but purging simple meals. It got worse and worse. For a while I was eating baby food because I wouldn't allow myself to eat anything else. I got to the point that my parents would try to force feed me, held my hands behind my back and put a spoon of soup in my mouth which I spit out in there face.  My parents didn't know what to do and called the physiatrist who worked with me in the psych ward and they addicted me back.  This time I wasn't suicidal but I think the fact that my anorexia was so bad they were able to do it on that account and I went along with it.  I remember sitting there not wanting to eat and refusing to eat.  It got to the point that the doctor threatened to tube feed me if I didn't start eating, so I started eating enough to make them happy, but as little as I possibly could. At that point I was already on the list for the eating disorder program in the same hospital but at this point in time  I couldn't do it as I could not eat full meals by myself.  I kept losing weight  and my blood pressure was really low they were checking it every day, but in my head that was a good thing, because that meant I was sick, it meant I was thin. Though in my head I was never thin enough.  It used to drive me crazy that I never lost my period which is a criteria for anorexia so I got labelled ED-NOS a lot of the time, though I was on birth control and I now realize that the period was likely forced, to this day I still don't know if I can get a period without birth control and rather I destroyed my chances to have kids. 

When I was older I went off birth control and didn't not get my period for over 6 months so they put me back on it. Either way in my head I was not good enough not thin enough. I remember hearing the doc say that if I didn't keep my weight above a certain bmi I would not be able to get into the eating disorder program and my mind went well I better lose the 6 lbs I need to lose to get right on that cut off bmi and not less.  I still remember the day the doctor talked to my parents  and me, saying that if I didn't start eating and to try recovery that I would be dead by Christmas, That was 7 years ago and I am still here but not without a fight.  I think that was the wake up call I needed and I gradually started to eat again, but still terrified of food and gaining weight.  I was transferred to another unit where I was able to stay longer and they still watched me and was hoping to get me into the eating disorder program in that hospital.  We did a variety of groups for treatment, my favourites were ceramics and art  group  when I was finally allowed to go to them because for the longest time I was too thin and sick they did not want me to walk around. I also remember being in that unit once I was allowed to get off the unit, and I went to the gym that was downstairs and worked out as hard as I could only to have one of the psych nurses come down and stop me saying I was not allowed to exercise because I was too sick.  I was pretty mad at that situation because I still wanted to lose weight and felt like I wasn't thin enough. 

The days were getting closer to the time when I was suppose to enter the actual eating disorder program and my brain kept telling me, " You are not sick enough, you will be the fattest one there. You don't deserve treatment. You are a failure. You are not good enough. You need to starve yourself more. Everyone will look at you and think you are way to fat."  The crazy thing is I was thinking those thoughts when I was severely underweight and hit the bmi weight criteria for anorexia and was under it yet in my mind I was still too fat.  My eating disorder was trying to kill me and it amazing that it didn't.   Around that time I was talking to a girl online  on an eating disorder support chat and she said she was coming to the same eating disorder treatment program as me, and I was excited to meet her. She said she was coming on this day and I suddenly got depressed because she was getting in before me, but in reality I was wrong, we both got admitted into the program the same day and we had been talking to each other for months before that online. I see that as another one of those high power moments.  I started treatment and one of the first things they did was weigh me, and I felt so embarrassed because the nurse said I was shorter then I actually was which meant to them my bmi was higher still in the anorexic range but higher and the nurse said oh that's not too bad. I was devastated in my head not too bad meant I was too fat not thin enough.  I look at the other girls around me and compared myself to see who was bigger and who was thinner and I was jealous of the thinner girls because I wanted to be thin like them but at the time I didn't realize how thin I really was myself. We started the program and right away I had to eat a full meal. It was a test period if we couldn't eat full meals we would get kicked out of the program.  Now my perfectionism has its benefits as well and I took that as a challenge I would not get kicked out of this program. Then I hit a wall, boiled eggs, I hate boiled eggs with a passion, I think I have a taste aversion to them from when I was younger. I threw up eggs once when I was a kid because I was sick and hated them ever since. So I refused to eat it. The staff did not like that at all but then I was able to work through it. We were allowed 3 dislikes. At the time I was vegetarian mind you it was a "eating disorder" vegetarianism and not a "animal rights" vegetarianism. In my head eating meat would make me fat, mind you I wasn't really eating much of anything  before that anyways.  I picked my three  dislikes, eggs, Poultry  and red meat, I was mad because I couldn't pick all meat as the three meat dislike options were poultry, red meat and fish, but I figured our of all the options fish would have the least amount of calories and the most protein and in the menu there was only once or twice where I would have to eat fish as most of the time I could use my dislikes to get out of one of the meat options.

  I look back and I was like wow I was really messed up about how food works and food issues. I started my gradual process of gaining the weight back to a normal weight in my range.  I hated it when they added extras to my meal to put on weight and also that I wasn't allowed to do any exercise. I wasn't allowed to stand up while making a phone call because that would burn too many calories. Though I have to admit I snuck a few crunches in there when people were not looking.  It was a really gradual but scary process in order to gain weight back.  I was so terrified of being fat that gaining weight was devastating to me.  I will share how I started to get into recovery and the benefits of the program in the next chapter.

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