Aftermath of Bulimia Friday, Aug 8 2008

I haven’t talked much about my former eating disorder in this blog very much. In some ways, it is a topic I now avoid because I haven’t induced vomiting in over a year and that was part of a life I’d rather forget. However, my 7-year addiction to bulimia is now simply a part of who I am as a person moving forward. I can’t escape that time of my life because so much happened during it that has set my life course. The long-term effects just on me alone are staggering. The ways that my ED has rippled to those I have come in contact with are immeasurable. I simply have to accept that fact no matter how horrified I am. I didn’t even realize, until recently, just how bad I was during that time. I am well today because of 3 factors:

1) I got out of my first marriage. As saddened as I am to say this, I do not believe I would have gotten well in time before I either a) died or b) killed myself remaining married to my first husband. It grieves me on so many levels to admit that because he is not a bad person. He was simply fundamentally toxic to me as an individual.

2) I met my current husband. Yes, I was still married. Yes, he was too. There are consequences of this I’ll talk about later. However, the fact remains that he saved my life. He saw someone within me, buried as it was, that he liked and thought the world needed to have. He spent hours, days, immeasurable amounts of time just simply being there for me.

3) I got pregnant. A seemingly inopportune time turned into the best “mistake” of my life. Pregnancy balanced the rest of me out in a way I couldn’t see until very recently. While I was perfectly comfortable hurting myself, once my destructive behavior towards myself was hurting another living being, I couldn’t do it anymore. I am forced every day to take care of myself because that life depends on me.

Though I am “well,” recovery is a daily process in the sense of, I still have to fight my tendencies because of anxiety and depression, I still feel the physical effects and I have to deal with what I did at my worst thereby causing anxiety and depression that I continue to deal with on a daily basis.

Every day I sit at work I am grateful that I still have my job. My performance was TERRIBLE for about a year. The only way I can explain it is this. Think about the most hungry and most tired you have ever been at work. Then think of how you felt. Maybe you recall headaches, being jittery, your mind focused on getting some food and sleep. Maybe there was also just an inabilty to focus. Now take all of that and multiply that every work day over a year with compounding results. I was going to work every day malnurished with an electrolyte imbalance on top of severe depression and anxiety disorder and who knows what other hormonal imbalances. I couldn’t concentrate, remember simple tasks and instructions, deal well with others and just do my job.

My entire day was planned around food and when I could throw it up. At its worst, that was 2-4 times just during work hours alone. When I wasn’t focused on eating and throwing up, I was focusing on covering up my addiction and overcompensating in my behavior so people wouldn’t know. And until it got bad enough, I was a PRO at covering up. On top of all of that, I had gained weight because my stomach had simply stopped processing food correctly. All of my bulimic activities that were supposed to keep me thinner were making me fatter. Of course, none of that made sense at the time so I would go off the deep end even more throwing up trying to take the weight off. My self-esteem and body image were at ZERO. While I am not on People’s 50 Most Beautiful, I am attractive and shapely enough that, under normal circumstances, I do not need to try to be noticed. I never cared that much before either. However, when you have no self-esteem, low body self image, and are 30 lbs heavier than you are comfortable with (for a short frame, that’s a lot), you start to act desperate. I was making myself “available” for flirting and such while I was married because my husband was ignoring me. I need to get a self-esteem fix somewhere.

As a result of my bulimic induced stupidity, I put myself into numerous situations in which I was lucky, quite frankly, that I wasn’t raped, kidnapped or killed. Well, that’s not entirely true. I was sexually assaulted because I made a very poor judgment call on trusting a business colleague while on a business trip. To this day, the shame that comes with that incident…well, I just can’t go there. I don’t even remember most of it other than waking up in a strange hotel room laying in some of my own blood because I was having my period.

The more well I get, the more I’m aware of the damage to myself and others that I caused. I have to work every day at reminding myself that I am better and that many decisions were made under duress, stress and depression. I would not make most of the same decisions. And even that is hart because, while some have been destructive, I would not have my wonderful husband, nor my beautiful son. I can only regret but so much.

I’m not sure how to end this post. I’m simply aware and processing. I am trying to take the lessons I learned coming out of that time and live my life better and more full. My eating disorder will always be with me though. It just doesn’t have to rule me.

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Panic Disorder and Eating Disorders Wednesday, Jul 2 2008

I had an interesting conversation with my husband a few weeks ago. I don’t know why I’m thinking about it now exactly.  He was telling me about his ex-wife’s panic disorder.  How he used to have to let her grip his hands and breathe with her, etc… Basically how bad they used to be.  I commented that yes, panic disorder absolutely sucks as I have a lot of personal experience with it.  I paused for reflection thinking back to when, prior to forcing myself to throw up, I used to get panic attacks.  I wouldn’t even see them coming.  All of a sudden my muscles would start twitching, my breathing would get shallow, my lungs would feel like the air was being squeezed out and then it would explode into full-blown hyperventilating.

He then said, “Yeah, but you didn’t have this happen on a regular basis to the point of needing to collapse into sleep and being utterly exhausted!”  I take a second to marvel at a) Why on earth is he seemingly defending his ex-wife and belittling my experience and b) he has no effing clue.  Really.  I started to find myself getting extremely irritated at him…AND her (her for simply existing and morphing my husband into someone he wasn’t).  These people have no idea, NO idea what I went through for years.  No, I did not have years of panic disorder in the traditional sense.  I learned to cope with anxiety and rising panic by throwing up.  I didn’t have continued panic attacks because I took care of it by up-chucking food into a toilet, or sink, or whatever was available for my hurling pleasure.  An eating disorder is the worst kind of panic disorder.  It is self-abuse to the extreme.

So yes dear husband, I think I have a small clue and then some, of what living with panic disorder is all about.  More than I can ever and would ever want to explain.  Unless you have ever existed in the hell of your own mind, it is indescribable.

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On My Eating Disorder Monday, May 12 2008

One of the topics I will bring up now and again in various posts will be the fact I had an eating disorder. I say I am an eating disorder survivor because by the time I finally received mental and physical health, I was on a quick decline to death…either by heart failure or suicide. When all was said and done, I was bulimic for 7-years. At my worst, towards the end, I was throwing up 3-6 times a day, 7-days a week. My stomach had stopped functioning properly. I had what was called gastricparesis. Essentially food was staying in my stomach and not moving through to my intestines in a timely manner. So much vomiting had damaged the muscles around the stomach. In fact, it was 5 times slower than the normal digestive rate. As a result, my body was absorbing all of the calories and fat causing me to gain roughly 30 pounds…the exact opposite of what a person with an eating disorder intends when they start. On top of that, all of the vomiting had eroded my esophogus and some teeth enamel causing mouth aches and heartburn. I lived with constant reflux and heartburn. It became part of my daily life so much so that I ceased to notice the pain. The worst physical effect of ED though was that it created a Level 2 Heart problem in one of my valves. I had actually damaged my heart. While the damage might not be permanent, it will take a long time of taking care of myself to get it back to “normal.” All of those problems, and my doctor told me I was “lucky” considering how long and how bad I had been abusing myself. And that is just the physical side of the problem.

The emotional impact of an eating disorder lasts a lifetime. It took years to get to the point I was at in 2005 and 2006. It will take many more years to eradicate the dizzying thought processes that got me to that point in the first place. I liken the whole thing to an addiction…a deadly addiction. Every day I would tell myself that I was hurting myself, but after every fight with my husband, every mistake I made, overeating, etc… whatever fuel I could use to justify the abuse, up come the food and bile into the toilet. I would go through a cycle of self-loathing, desire to vomit, vomiting, release, momentary euphoria and then SHAME. I could never escape the shame. But an eating disorder becomes one’s dirty little secret. Something you sickly hold on to because its yours. A control you have. Something you know that no one else knows.

Reading this now, now that I haven’t thrown up in a year, the whole thing seems demented. Dysfunctional. And it is. There is no way around the fact that I have been sick and dysfunctional almost my entire adult life. My first marriage unraveled as a result as well. Not of the eating disorder (or disease as my ex-husband liked to call it) but because of what caused and fueled the disorder and much of that started when he and I dated in high school and college.

Ok, I’m going to have to continue this post later as I need to get some sleep. There is a lot to this story I can explore in later posts.

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