A Letter to the Insurance Company

I am currently going through an appeal, hoping that my insurance company will see the error of their ways and reimburse my family for some of the money they paid out of pocket for me to remain in residential treatment. Below is one of the letters I wrote in my appeal.
*Trigger Warning, as always*

Even though my eating disorder began at the age of four, it took seventeen years for someone like Dr. Hermann to confront my problem. She referred me to The Renfrew Center for Eating Disorders in June of 2011, because I had gone from weighing above 135 lbs to below 110 lbs in a very fast amount of time. My percentage of suggested weight and my restrictive eating habits were more than reason enough for her to send me to specialists dealing with eating disorders. At Renfrew, I had a two hour long intake with Dr. Cooper who immediately recommended residential treatment, saying that I was “too sick for a lower level of care”. When I mentioned possibly doing an Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP), Dr. Cooper told me that I was too “medically fragile” for that level of care, anything lower than residential treatment was not going to be offered to me by the Renfrew Center. This was on June 20^th of 2011.

I started to try recovery on my own. I was seeing a dietitian and a therapist on a weekly basis while working full-time at a magnet school teaching middle and high school Latin.

In October, I taught all day feeling as if at any moment I could have a heart attack. After school, I saw my dietitian, Katherine Fowler, who immediately sent me to the Vanderbilt ER. I was admitted into the emergency room with dangerously low potassium levels and low magnesium levels.

Even after missing work for a life threatening situation, I still did not make the progress in recovery that one would hope. It was after this, hitting rock bottom and knowing it, that Dr. Herrmann and my dietitian decided that I must go into residential treatment. My life depended on it.

Jenni Schaefer makes a very profound statement in her book Life Without Ed, a book about eating disorder recovery. She says that she was at a seemingly “normal” weight when she was the deepest in her eating disorder, when she was restricting, bingeing, and purging the most. The same is somewhat true for me. What many people look at when they see an eating disordered patient are the numbers. The phrase, “But you don’t look sick” comes out of their mouths more often than not. If my exposed collar bones, my clearly evident scapulae, and my countable ribs were not enough to make me sick enough by the standards of an outsider, then I would encourage them to dig a little deeper. What about restricting to only 300 calories a day? What about forcibly vomiting a minimum of forty times a week? What about bingeing on Taco Bell, Sonic, and ice cream only when my body was so deprived that I needed something to stay standing only to forcibly remove the food from my body within two hours of consumption?

Not only did doctors and trained professions urge me to seek residential treatment, but I also saw the horrible nature of the life I was living. My only hope is that the insurance company sees that too.