Downward Spiral Part 2

...So the question is, after that amazing time where God stepped in and poured out amazing amounts of freedom...How did I get to where I am today?

I ask myself that same question everyday. How in the world did I ever get to this point in life? Well here are the facts to the second part of the story that bring me up to where I am today.

I lived in that freedom for about 3 months but one day in late july I made the terrible mistake of stepping on the scale and completely freaked out In retrospect the number was not that high at all but it was definitely higher than the number that I had once gone down to. So that mixed in with a lot of things happening in my life (namely the stress of college being over and real life begining to start, I was going to be moving to Boston in a month), I backslided over night into listening to the terrible voices in my head that told me I had to starve to be successful and I needed to be thin to be worthy of love. I again told myself that I only had to lose a few more pounds and then everything would be ok again. By the time I got to Boston I would be more than ready to tackle anything God threw at me.

Well, here it is over 8 months later and I still feel far from ok. I'm finally moving forward but I never imagined in a million years that I could make my own life so unbelievably complicated. Some people can go a long time in denial of eating disorders, I realized overnight that I had a problem but I had no idea how to tackle it. When I was still in Buffalo I visited an eating disorder center that provided me some resources to help me out in Boston. When I got to Boston, I started looking into different counselors (which I really despised the idea to begin with because just the idea of seeing a conselor made me feel crazy), but I just wanted my life back. City Year provided some help through the employee assistance program which paid for a counselor for 6 weeks. 6 weeks came and went and I was left again with nothing because health insurance wouldn't cover anything.

Life did nothing but get harder as I refused to eat more than XXXX calories a day but was working up to 11 hours a day doing fairly intense work. My brain just hurt and I lived life in a fog. I came to the conclusion that I needed to tell my boss a little of what was going on. Although really scary at the time, it was really one of the best moves I made because she immediately was able to sympathize and move into a proactive mode. She found me a counselor that City Year was willing to pay for, and better yet, it was a Christian counselor. I talked with her a few weeks but our communication was not that great and at this point (being early December) she was not realizing how desperate I was for change and how much my physical body was going down hill. It was always, "well, I will see you again next week" and I was getting to the point that one week was just too long.

There came a day at work that I realized that I was just mentally, emotionally, and physically gone. I could barely walk down the stairs without feeling dizzy but eating more was just beyond comprehension. My daily calorie amount just kept going down more and more because I just was never satisfied with the amount of weight I was losing. I remember stepping out in the hall from my classroom and calling Jess because I just knew I couldn't do it anymore. She began to conspire with my boss and before I knew it, I was sitting in the ER of mass general trying to comprehend for the life of me how I let it get this far. Where did I go wrong? My identity that I once had was completely lost and I just felt so trapped and stuck.

And I was hoping the ER was as rock bottom as I could go but I learned that it was far from it. After being left alone in a waiting room for 4 hours, I was asked a bunch of questions that made me feel like I was completely crazy, they took blood and did an ekg, and let me go with the words, "Stable" printed on the discharge form...ah the irony of life. They gave me the phone number of the Cambridge Eating Disorder center. At this point I had gathered a great list of phone numbers so what was one more for my collection. I was too terrified to even think about calling them, trying to hold on to any dignity I had left and trying to convince myself that I still wasn't that bad.

Soon after that I went home for a well needed Christmas break. At this point the parentals still had no idea what was going on and I have the amazing capability of allowing myself to eat for very short periods of time, as long as I found a way to compensate later on. However, I was home for 2 weeks which was the longest I had allowed myself to eat in quite awhile. When returned to Boston and headed back to work I had completely freaked at what I thought I had done to my body and desperately tried to make up for it somehow. I convinced myself that I could survive off of 300 calories a day well still working and chasing small children around....that lasted about a week.

I went back to my boss to simple tell her that I couldn't do it anymore. No matter how much I tried I just ultimately would fail again. I no longer was offering much to the kids I worked with because I was just a walking zombie. I needed to get help no matter how terrifying that sounded. So I worked with her to suspend my service from City Year so I could take some time just to try to get life a little organized again. I originally was only going to be out for 3 weeks because that is how long City Year would hold my health insurance for....that was over 2 months ago.

I was looking for another quick fix....it hasn't come yet. I at the point of leaving work was still talking to the Christian counselor. The day I left work I called her in search of some help and guidance in getting further treatment. She called me back three days later to tell me she "wasn't allowed to talk to me anymore until I got help from an eating disorder center because I was too critical. If I needed further help I should use the emergency room as a resource" (Which she well knew that the last time I was there they did nothing for me besides charge me 3000 dollars for sitting in a waiting room).

Because it was a new year, the EAP would pay for 6 more counseling sessions with the first counselor I saw when I came to Boston so I got back in touch with him hoping he could help me out with resources to get further treatment. He gave me more phone numbers which really did nothing but overwhelm me. However, I began to work with my boss and began calling some of them. One absolutely refused to return either of our phone calls and one actually told me that I was not critical enough based soley by height and weight (at this point I was not medically underweight because my metabolism was so screwed up)...but on a side note that was the worst thing anyone has said to me thus far. To tell someone with an eating disorder that she has not lost enough weight made me feel like a complete failure. What more could I do? I was eating practically nothing! The person on the phone actually told me that if I got any worse to call back.

So I was too critical for the counselor and not critical enough for the eating disorder center. My boss, who really at this point was one of the few people who didn't completely dump me, was still very proactively trying to work with me to get help so I could head back to work. She got me an appointment at an eating disorder center in Waltham. I was fighting it with all of my might because the idea of actually going into a center was the most petrifying idea ever but she, against my will, picked me up at my apartment and drove me there. However, it turns out that I had no reason to be frightened because after being stabbed with another needle and waiting in a room for another 4 hours I was told, "We really think you need help and we would love to help you but quite frankly you can't afford us so come back if you get better health insurance."

At this point I was pretty fed up with life. I finally had come to the point that I was desperately asking for help but wasn't getting it from anywhere. I felt like all doors had been slammed in my face. However, the boss told me that I should apply for Mass Health Insurance because that would cover a lot more of treatment than the health insurance I had with city year. However, that was going to be a 3 week process in itself. I debated going back to work and just trying to stick it out until June but I also had this vision of freedom in my head and had come to the conclusion that even though it meant being out of work much longer than I intended, freedom wasn't going to come by going back.

So I went home for 2 of those weeks as I waited for mass health to kick in. However, when I returned to boston I found a letter in my mailbox to tell me I was denied MassHealth because when I applied I still had city year insurance. Now if I wasn't stuck before, I certainly was stuck now. There was no way I could get into the eating disorder center without insurance so I needed to come up with another plan.

This is where God can open doors where I never expected. I found wonderfulness in the Codman Square Health Center....where they live under the motto that your ability to be treated should not be based on your ability to pay. I started seeing a doctor there who set me up with a counselor through the clinic. Then after discovering some semi frightening things in my bloodwork the doctor also set me up with a nutritionist (who no matter what kind of insurance you have, is not normally covered) and all of this was and is free for me.

The nutritionist has been great because after a year of distorted eating habits, you forget completely what eating normally is. And although I have never been a huge fan of doctors, this one I will give 5 stars to. After working with him for 3 months, he has been one of the few professionals in the care giving business that have no completely dumped me. So I finally had a whole support group going for me under one roof, and it didn't even involve me having to take the hour and a half commute out to Waltham.

So this basically brings me up to where I am now. Realizing that recovery is exceptionally painful as you begin to learn things about yourself that you don't like that much. You have to think about things that you have deliberately blocked out of your mind and every day and every meal you have to go through a battle with your greatest enemy -- food.