Christina Syndrome

A few years ago, my best friend started having adverse reactions to certain foods or after eating. She would have extreme stomach pain, cramping, and a ton of GI problems that no one ever resolved. We just called it "Christina Syndrome".

When I was refeeding, it would take me hours to finish 50% of a meal. My stomach could not digest properly. Digestion was a foreign thing to my body. I had deprived my body for so long of nutrients, that taking in those nutrients became extremely painful. I'm sure Ed was in there too, and that it wasn't entirely my body reacting to food.

While I don't consider myself "in recovery", I am no longer refeeding. I'm not at my goal weight (whatever that is). I have not gained enough weight to be considered an "appropriate" range. My metabolism is out of whack, and Katherine has put me on a really intense meal plan so that I don't lose any more weight than I already have coming out of treatment. Ed doesn't like this idea. Regardless of the weight I have gained and the progress I have made, eating has not become easier either mentally or physically. Here's the process...

I eat, therefore, I feel sick.
I eat, therefore, my stomach screams in pain.
I eat, therefore, I can feel my body attempting to digest food.
I eat beyond fullness cues so that I meet my meal plan, therefore, I send my body into immense pain, giving me high restriction and purging urges.
I eat, and immediately I have stomach pain.
Nothing is regulated.

I'm already horrible at assessing pain levels, but now I have to do it after everything I eat. Blood draws, GI appointments, dietitian appointments... I'm going through all of these hoops in some attempt to figure out why eating is so difficult. I know that there is a mental component to this, but there is also a physical one. I shouldn't feel like I'm in that scene from Alien when the alien comes out of the stomach every time I eat. It even happens when I eat "safe" foods. Have I really screwed up my body so much that now I have created an intolerance to certain foods because I deprived my body of them for so long?

Ya know... people say "It's not about the food." But dammit... I need to eat. I know I do. Some Part of me wants to eat! But why can't I eat, digest, and have a nice, normal cycle like that!?!? Why can't it just be food? Why can't I just eat it, and not be in pain?!




P.S. I'm really tired of Web MD-ing my symptoms... Suggestions? Get on x, y, and z medications. I'm on ALL OF THOSE. THEY DON'T HELP. SCREW YOU.


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Blame and Responsibility

As I thumb through the Rolodex that is my history, certain things stand clear. Memories I wish I had never experienced and days that happened in the early 90s and in my teens that are as vivid today as they were back then.

Recently, my grandfather passed away. Since then, we have been sorting old pictures that we found in his house, pictures of my childhood that hide this dysfunction and show the mask. Was I really wearing the mask at the age of 7? I can't help but think to myself, "How the hell did it get this way?" When did everything change? How did it change? How did I go from...

To the chronically ill person I am today? Who do you blame for that? How did that little girl grow up to have hundreds of papers and documents in hospital basements, psychiatrist offices, and therapists' offices? Who fucked her up? Was it you or was it me?

When I was fourteen, I started going to my pediatrician for pain. This wasn't the beginning of everything, but it was the beginning as I knew it at the time. You're growing. It's just growing pains. Yeah, right. I hadn't grown in two years, so that was ruled out. A few months later, I saw the same pediatrician. Tendonitis. Your tendons are just sore; take Tylenol. Okay. No luck. Again and again and again until that doctor got the idea that I should probably see someone more specialized. So then came the orthopedic appointments. Jumper's Knee. Right, because I jump all the time... Wrong. Tendonitis. Still not that... Arthritis. I'm fourteen! Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis. Wrong again. Torn meniscus. Nope. Broken patella. Nope. Synovitis? Well sorta. But your medication didn't help. X-rays, nuclear medicine tests, MRIs, you name it. I was given some test for it. This lasted until I was about seventeen. Eventually with the orthopedic it got to three phases of not knowing what was wrong. Phase 1: Cortisone shots! That made things worse. Phase 2: Let's just open your knee up and look at this! Phase 3: Call you a hypochondriac. So then came the new doctor, a sports medicine doctor. Mind you, I sucked at sports. My sports career had ended when everyone else became the same height as me. He said I had arthritis, and I was put on an Asprin regimen. He then referred me to a fellow at Vanderbilt who specialized in rheumatology. I swear, she and her supervisor were bound and determined to diagnose me is PsA. They failed. June 1st 2009, I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. 

And that was it. Life = altered. Welcome to the world of being "chronic", the world of pain medications, and the world of being an invisible sufferer (though I was already used to that). I did my research. I saw some clips from doctors. I heard some podcasts. Something about all of my research stuck out. The most common thought surrounding the onset of Fibromyalgia is severe emotional or physical trauma. Let's see, I was 14 when I started complaining of pain... and I was 14 when fit hit the shan with my grandmother... Hm. Common denominator, anyone? And with that, the blame began.

Along with being diagnosed with Fibromyalgia, in one singular doctor's appointment I was also diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and Attention Deficit Disorder. So, I'd like to say a big ole thanks to whoever gave me all that crap.

As I grew older, so did my list of medications. Exactly two years after being diagnosed with Fibromyalgia, I was diagnosed with Anorexia Nervosa. It was one of those times where I kept saying, "But this is how I've been my entire life!" A few days after being told I needed inpatient treatment, I weighed myself after a heavy restriction period followed by binge drinking. I was a little under 70% of my suggested body weight, and I was 9 lbs away from my goal weight. I think it was at that moment, knees shaking, on the scale that I realized I had been this way my entire life...

Good food. Bad food. Eat this. Not that. You have to fit into size 0 jeans. You can't even try on those jeans. Buy everything in an extra small. Breakfast is unnecessary. You're not hungry. You're just a picky eater. On and on and on and on and on. Whoever says "I wonder where Ann got that from?" obviously doesn't know me or my story very well. 

I was anorexic at the age of four, actively restricting by five, eating normally but purging by thirteen, back to restriction throughout high school and college, and once I started working it was a new beast of restriction, bingeing, and purging. 

Who does that to themselves? See that girl up there? I did that to her. 

When I went into treatment, there was a list of words and acronyms underneath MEDICAL/PSYCHOLOGICAL that made me realized how I was nothing more than a few really shitty diagnoses. ED: NOS, GAD, CFS, OCD, Depressive Disorder, Fibromyalgia, Potential for electrolyte imbalance, Hematemesis, Hypokalemia, Osteopenia, Chronic Vitamin D Deficiency, and that one I didn't expect PTSD. What?!?! You mean, that thing that all those soldiers at Ft. Campbell have when they come home from Iraq? No. Not me. What?!? Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?! These words and acronyms brought something new to my life I had never truly understood. I narrowed it down to one of three options...

1. I fucked myself up hardcore.

2. Someone else fucked me up hardcore.

3. God made me this way.

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This was originally going to be a blog post about some anger I have towards people and some shame I have towards myself. How did I get to where I am now? Is it my fault or is it yours? I think I stayed from the path somewhere in there, and I ask your forgiveness for that. All I know is that right now I have no idea on how to express the shame and responsibility I feel for taking that little girl and causing her muscles to atrophy, starving her, forcing her to expel nutrients from her body. I cut her. I bruised her. I deprived her. I gave her scars. I gave her the bones of a woman 50 years her elder. I put her into chronic pain. I am the reason why she has to take a handful of pills in the morning to function, some throughout the day so she doesn't fall over from intestinal pain, and a handful at night so she can sleep and the noises of her perpetrators (those people I let get to her) will quiet down just for a little while. 

The Last Two Months

A little over two months ago, I had one of the most horrific experiences of my life. Crumpled on a bathroom floor in my work clothes, I held back every emotion possible as my shaky hands pressed against the porcelain seat of a toilet to push my body to a standing position. I wiped off the remnants of whatever semblance of a breakfast I had earlier in the day from my lips and replaced it with the mask. The mask is what I wear. She is who I am not. She is who I wish I could be. She was the woman my students saw. She wasn't always there, but she was there a lot. She covered up the tears and the shame and the guilt and the shaking in my legs after days of restriction. She made me look put together.

Only God knows how I got through two classes after that... It was after this girls' bathroom experience that I had a meeting with my dietitian. Somewhere in the mix of all of this, she and I decided that I needed residential treatment for my eating disorder. I went for seven and a half weeks until I was kicked out for reasons that I find completely illogical. Regardless, while I was there, I did learn a lot about my eating disorder. I learned a lot about myself. Communication became better with me and my family. That's the Reader's Digest version. In truth, I don't think I could ever explain what happened between October 10th and December 1st in any blog or in words at all. It was a convoluted mess of writing agendas on how I "need to be sick" and what my eating disorder was trying to say to everyone around me. I wrote a history of my life as I saw it through my rose colored glasses. I uncovered memories I had suppressed from the age of four, some when I was thirteen and the most grotesque from when I was eighteen. I had therapy, endless hours of therapy. I made relapse prevention plans. I battled insurance companies. I ate three meals a day, three snacks a day, one cup of chocolate soy milk with dinner, and tried going without acting on behaviors.

While in treatment, I did listen to Ed. He was pretty sneaky. I did what he wanted, and I still do to this day. That's a scary statement to write. He won't let me wear jeans; so I haven't worn jeans in six weeks. He won't let me wear form fitting shirts; so I haven't worn a form fitting shirt in weeks. No butter. No cream sauces. No fried anything. No ice cream. The last time I ate ice cream (save one time at Castlewood), I binged. I didn't know I binged until recently. I told you Ed was sneaky.

More recently, things have been.... different? I suppose that's a fitting word. I'm seeing Thom. Ed hates him. I love him, and that's the way it should be. I'm seeing Katherine again. Ed still hates her. I still love her. As Thom says, we need to be pissing that son of a bitch off. Who knows if I'm pissing him off now or not... Sometimes his voice sounds a lot like my own. It's pretty hard to discern. I have no idea if my forced restriction upon myself is Ed. I know... I know... Forced restriction, Ann? That sounds like Ed. But seriously, I am in pain if I eat to my meal plan. That's not right, is it? Maybe this is all rationalization. I don't know. I feel like I don't know much of anything these days.