I. Crashing
You take medicine because there’s something wrong, because you want to fix something. There’s a pain in your knee or your sinuses are congested. For something to be fixed, it must first be broken or incorrect in some way. Medicine is a remedy to an ailment.
Addicts need something to survive: a drug, a behavior. The dopamine centers in their brain respond to consumption of a certain substance or engagement in a certain activity.
My drug was air. I gulped it down by the gallon. Then I proceeded to burn off the calories of oxygen and nitrogen with sit ups and jumping jacks in my childhood bedroom. My high was starvation and bones. Sly as I thought I was, I couldn’t hide the victories of my protruding hip bones and sunken eye sockets from my loving parents.
My mom knew when I asked for lentils in my oatmeal, the craving weird and specific. My dad knew when I asked him to turn the heat up more when he already told me it was on high. And my brother knew when he lost all traces of his older sister. I was replaced by a ghastly white ghost, crouching in the corner of the room instead of sitting on the couch.
I read the same paragraph of my mystery novel. It mentioned warm cornbread, filling my mind with the indulgence of food in the absence of consuming it.
My last night at home, I sat on the couch. Floating on my breath was the stink of churning stomach acid. The entire room was eerily silent as my father took my pulse.
He didn’t let me go to school that day. No breakfast, no school. So I spent the day at my grandmother’s. Sleeping under a blanket on the floor. Curled up next to the space heater like a desert lizard. My anger replaced by bone aching exhaustion, he took his hand away. He said my pulse was 120. He miscalculated.
They still took me into Boston. Snow fell in heavy, wet clumps as we hobbled out to the car. In my blue parka and wool hat, I shivered quietly in the back seat. Like an incompetent criminal, I’d been caught. We were on route to Boston Children’s hospital, my future prison. It was the pediatrician who told them I was anorexic. Stupid Doctor Jolles.
II. Refeeding
Meals lasted hours, eating up my day.
I sat with the food for at least 30 minutes. Then I sat with the liquid nutrition supplements for another half hour. Inevitably they lubed up a feeding tube.
I screamed when they tried to put the nasogastric tube in, covering my head with the same bucket I vomited my nutrition supplements into. The cool gel squirmed down my throat and tears reflexively welled up in my eyes. The fluid expanded my belly and then came right back up.
They tried again and it stayed down. I laid on my side, willing myself to expel the poison of thick chocolate-flavored calories.
I remember the pain, but memories of people are fleeting:
- My art teacher’s boyfriend came to cut my hair, preserving some of my dignity. Dry clumps of scraggly curly hair fell into the cleaned vomit basin.
- The Rabbi and Cantor sang a healing prayer. My face red as I thought of the kids down the hall with cancer. I was sick from my own fault, I had a choice.
- My brother’s big brown eyes as he stared at his frail china doll of an older sister. He wouldn’t get near me and all my wires.
- MJ the nurse’s assistant chewing ice in solidarity as I chewed none of my pasta and garlic bread.
- Security guards strapped down my weak frame as an NG tube was forced down my protesting throat. I had threatened to hit the nurses with my trusty vomit basin. They let go and I lay in a puddle of my own vomit. They couldn’t hold that down.
III. Resuscitation
Days began with a 5am weigh-in and ended at midnight with Nurse Linda coaxing me to rest, my eyes threatening to shut. The hum of the automatic feeding tube combined with my roomate’s snores created an unwavering and chaotic nightmare.
Marissa’s body housed scars that showed me how to cut. Lousia tried to tell me I was too young, tried to tell me my worth. Christina showed me what it was like to be a life-long anorexic, she smoked to make it last longer. Riley and Rebecca assumed the role of my psych ward older sisters. Amelia was also 12 years old, thinner than I was. Becky always wore her My Little Pony pajamas and carried her matching blanket.
I didn’t eat. Broken. I screamed and slammed my head against the table in the common room. Crazy. A last resort, a life-preserver: medication. Joining the teenage girls with their cups of blue and white tablets, I chewed my multivitamin and choked down my protein supplement. I’d join them in being medicated once I got home.
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Olanzapine (Zyprexa): a second-generation antipsychotic medication approved to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. In individuals with anorexia, it may improve weight gain and decrease obsessive symptoms due to its ability to block dopaminergic and serotonergic receptors.
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IV. Maintenance
Back on wobbly legs and knocked knees, I ran through life like a clumsy giraffe. AP classes and state cross country championships. Covid quarantine and college applications. A high-achieving high school blur. Each day started and ended with swallowing pills.
High school graduation and the subsequent ending of my high school running career led to both my greatest fear and wildest dreams. AAs were replaced by DDs and a menstrual period. Food was so normal, honestly fun. New-found friendships provided laughter and many hugs. There was a mutual trust from my body and my family that I was doing the right thing, that I was recovered.
I was fixed, no longer broken. My weight and obsessive thoughts stabilized. Conclusion: I didn’t need to take the medication any longer. I’d get a therapist and take CBD. I’d continue my recovery in the “natural” way.
V. Withdrawal
I took my last Zyprexa on September 11th.
Sweaty and nauseous with withdrawal in the Indian Summer heat. Buzzing with thoughts and feelings. Sitting in the common room from 3am to 6 am because I was bored of sitting in bed awake.
October 6th, speed walking home from Shabbat. Tears burned and then poured when I reached my dorm. Neurochemicals out the window, I sliced my wrists with the knife I used to cut apples. Horror flooded my senses. Like a deer in headlights I called my mom, then my friends.
They stopped the bleeding and took the knife. The cuts healed. I faked stability and got the knife back. After a run, sweat still dripping, I slid the knife across my wrists. Salty sweat on the fresh wound stung like lemon juice.
A friend texted me about a Halloween party. Face puffy and eyes red, I lay in bed. Hand over my mouth, I screamed. Dehydrated from sobbing, I fell asleep with a dry tongue and snotty nose.
The morning of October 28th, I stumbled the half hour walk down to my therapist’s office. A ghastly white in the same pants I wore yesterday.
That night, I went back on the Zyprexa. It was like admitting defeat. It was admitting that something was so wrong within me that I needed to be on constant medication just to exist. You take medication to fix something, because something is broken.
VI. Resurrection
A week later, colors returned to my vision.
All I needed was the tiny white pill I took at night. Just given this image of dependency, some would say it’s an addiction.
It has sedative properties, so it made me sleep. It increases appetite, so that’s why I finally started eating. An egg salad sandwich followed by digestive enzymes. It’s a mood stabilizer, so I stopped shrieking and crouching under hospital tables.
I, me, myself.
The oval-shaped drug redirected my train. It was barreling down the track of self-destruction and an eventual death. The tracks shifted when I began to attend college. A quick deviation from the security of the track during my sophomore fall and then I was latched on again.
Late night chats with friends. Grey days and sparkly days. Twirling to Kiss Me by Sixpence None The Richer. A sweaty hike with a lofty view of the rural enclaves of Vermont. Toast with salted butter and fried eggs. Midnight, cozied up and reading my newest favorite book.
My medicine is in the moments. The moments I realize that I am ever more alive.