Eating Disorder Awareness- Intense

     It wasn't a split decision, the girl sat down at the dinner table and went for the skinless chicken, baked potato plain, some fruit, and a diet soda. Her parents looked at her puzzled because the girl usually went for the fried chicken, mac and cheese, and loaded her potato with butter and sour cream. She simply looked up and said that she was trying to get in shape, she only had a semester and summer before her senior year. Why would her parents think twice about their daughter eating healthy?
     As the weeks went on the diet continued and she started running every day after school along with crunches before bed. The girl had also started drinking slim fast shakes, eating a lot of fruit, and stopped drinking soda and eating fast food. Her mother had noticed a bit of weight loss, but she was proud of the girl. She had never wanted a chubby daughter. 
     One night the girl woke up with serious hunger pains and went running into the kitchen where she found a hamburger and bacon pizza from her step dad's store. Before she knew it she was wolfing it down along with mountain dew. The girl looked down at the pizza covered hands and the grease all over her clothes...a sudden panic swept over her as the girl ran to the bathroom stripping in the bathroom. She jumped on the scale, her protruding gut full of food, and the number was five pounds heavier. With the corner of her eye she spotted the porcalain gleam of the toilet bowl. Could she do it? The girl had never forced herself to vomit, infact she avoided it even when she was sick. Yet before she could stop herself she was wretching over the bowl watching her binge disappear. She didn't feel elated...she crossed a line in her own mind...diet just became a word she didn't associate with herself.
     When she got to her room she had a razor blade in her hand, something in her felt disgusting and she had to get it out, and before she knew it that razor sunk into her arm. As the blood rushed down her hand she felt nothing at last. It wasn't until the sun flooded through the window and the girl slammed her hand on the alarm clock. The guilt hit her immediately as she saw the deep cuts on her arms. She would be wearing long sleeves as she headed off to day one of senior year. 
     The first thing the girl did when she got in the bathroom she stripped again on the scale and the number was back down...a smile graced her empty lips. Today would be a good day, no one would notice the cuts, but they would see her trim figure. 
     That is what happened at first, everyone complimented her for months as she lost more and more weight, and then suddenly it stopped. The accusations from friends and teachers that loved her that she wasn't taking care of herself. She would lash out and tell them to leave her be because the girl had herself undercontrol. The only problem is that she didn't....that girl was controlled by a demon known as anorexia. 
     The family met with the school teachers and decided to take her to the doc where she was immediately diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and they found the slashes on her arms. She sat glaring at the doc, the monster had claws dug in and the girl had no intention of stopping. That is the thing about eating disorders, but the time you realize you have one it has already taken you over. The girl had become a walking, talking, spewing anger monster known as anorexia. 
      The parents tried to help her...every meal was a battleground, at school she had to eat with a teacher or nurse, she was watched everywhere she went, yet through all of this their efforts were futile. Therapy three times a week was accomplishing nothing, she was getting sicker and sicker and farther and farther away. The only thing to do was to put her in treatment or the hospital unit that costs over thirty thousand dollars a month. The girl's dad was a construction worker while her mom a preschool teacher, and they could barely make ends meet as it is. They spent everyday fighting with the insurance companies trying to get their daughter help, but they were left with the same answer she will benefit just fine from outpatient therapy despite her ever shrinking frame. She was too weak to even go to school anymore. 
     One day her parents walked in the door with a suitcase and told the girl they would be taking her to the Children's hospital Emergency Room. She screamed about how she was seventeen and could do what she wanted, her weak body couldn't handle this kind of physical activity, and before her parents could move the girl collapsed on the floor. She mumbled for them to leave her alone with the ambulance workers were trying to lift her onto the gurney. She barely flinched as an IV was started and oxygen was put on her face. 
     After three weeks in the intensive care unit after having a mild heart attack the girl would be moved to a general adolescent unit, and would be expected to eat. She had no intention of eating, and at the first time of refusal they shoved a tube down her nose. She fought the doctors and nurses tooth and nail, broke every rule she could, played with her feeds, so it wasn't a shock to the medical world when one night the girls heart monitor when long and loud. They tried to revive her for almost an hour, but her fraile body was too damaged, to starved to fight back, and at just eight days before her eighteenth birthday the girl died as a result of her eating disorder. They mourned her funeral, buried her in what would have been her graduation dress, and all her mom could repeat was "they told us outpatient was all she needed, all they would cover"...the girl is dead. 
     That girl is everywhere right now, some are dying, some are trying to recover on their own with no help from insurance, each day that passes they don't get help the more likely they will never recover. That is the truth about eating disorders...it is an ugly business, and I mean just that. It is all about making profit off very sick women, men, girls, and boys. They have had to open children's eating disorder treatment centers and you have seen nothing until you see a six year old with a yellow tube hanging out of her nose. It doesn't matter if you are eighty pounds if you can't pay you can go and keep starving yourself. Doctors are suppose to help people, but they are putting them in the poor house. How many parents have take seconds out on houses to hopefully find that recovery for their daughter. A third will never recover. 
     In the end it was the small stays in treatment centers we couldn't afford, the months in the hospital with IVs and feeding tubes, in the end I made the choice to recover. I couldn't keep living like this, somewhere between living and dead. I knew I was either going to fight through this or die. And, at first I didn't want to recover, but I hooked up to tube feeds and hydration, I didn't purge, I threw away the razors, and slowly but surely it got easier. I still have her in the cobwebs of my mind trying to break through from time to time seven years later. Now I can tell what voice I am hearing if it is me or that demon monster still in the depths. 
     Anorexia destroyed my life, lost family, friends, and my health. My stomach and intestines no longer work, have heart problems, and live in hospitals instead of with my son where I should be. But, as hard as it is I would rather live this life that that of captive to my disease. We have to rise up together and take charge. People will never understood the facts only we can tell them about eating disorders, we have to make them understand that treatment is important and some insurance doc on a golf course shouldn't be able to decide my form of treatment without even looking at the chart because they get paid to avoid sending EDs to treatment. 
     It is time for us to fight and be the change because no one is going to do it for us. Nothing has changed in years, why should only rich white girls get treatment, don't get me wrong I'm a poor white chick, but it shouldn't matter your race or anything to get help esp your bank account. You can go to drug rehab for free, but not eating disorder treatment. Mercy Ministries is not a valid treatment center for eating disorders expected to eat on their honor, counch rest, exercise...you can't trust someone with an eating disorder to do anything except lie about what they ate and where they ran. Are you going to stand up and yell with me...let us save some lives.