I am sick all the time but afraid to go to the doctor

Obviously, I need to get checked out, but at what price?  I don’t think Dr. K or any regular doctor can really help me to improve anything, first of all, because most of what I am experiencing has to do with my eating disorder, which seems to be running my life.  You can’t snap your fingers and make it go away, and even if I were to make drastic improvements in my behavior, my body would take years to catch up, if ever.

I am scared to go to the doctor because of my weight gain.  It will be a demeaning experience for sure.  Of course, I will self-protect and refuse to step on the scale.  I already know what I weigh.  It’s not that.  It’s stepping on the scale in front of a doctor that kills me.   All the memories of the “weekly weight checks.”  Ugh.  I’m not even underweight anymore, so I don’t think she should make a particular number her immediate concern, thus treating me like a height and weight (and insurance number) instead of like a human being.

Just about everyone who doesn’t have an eating disorder has no clue.  For those of you who have experienced severe depression, maybe you can relate to this feeling of being misunderstood.  How many times have people told you to “snap out of it”?  It’s just the same with eating disorders.  I read in many places that if someone with anorexia “recovers,” it takes nine years to get your body back to fully functioning…if you’re lucky.  If you’ve had anorexia for a short period you will bounce back faster, especially if you are young.

This so-called “weight recovery”….at what price?  My weight falls within normal range but I am more miserable than ever.  I still do horrible things to my body worse than ever, desperate to lose this weight.  I think of suicide all the time.  I have started to make “suicide plans” a handful of times, but I still haven’t been able to get the details worked out cuz I’m too damn tired.

It’s all about my weight 24/7.  A constant battle to hide my body every time I go out.  I have to wear just the right clothes to hide my pot belly.  Today I had to wear “fat” jeans because the usual pair, which is probably filthy cuz I’ve worn nothing else, seems too tight.  A possibility is to wear them completely unzipped and hope they don’t fall off of me.  If I wear a shirt a certain way, you can’t tell I’ve got unzipped jeans underneath with a pot belly sticking out.  I have done this on many occasions.  I have loose dresses but I look immense in them now, just a tiny head and huge body.

I sat in church with my jeans completely unzipped and a shirt covering this up last Sunday.  Actually, I walked to church with my pants unzipped.  I swear people were calling out from cars, “Fat pig!” while I walked along, or, shall I say, waddled along.  It was hard to focus during the service cuz all I could think about was my weight.  When I went to social hour, I first went into the bathroom and zipped them up. But I couldn’t walk down the stairs at church to get to the place where they have social hour.  I don’t remember why this was but I know it had to do with my weight.  I walked outside, then around to the back of the church, and re-entered where the bathrooms were.

When people saw me, I guess it showed how miserable I am cuz someone told me to sit down and she got me a cup of coffee and just sat with me.  I didn’t want to say much because her adolescent daughter was nearby.  Even though she probably couldn’t hear the conversation, I am afraid my eating disorder will “rub off” on kids, so I was careful about what I said.  On the other hand, I love seeing the kids at church cuz we treat our kids well.  Most seem to have incredibly healthy self-esteem.  But it breaks my heart comparing these kids to myself at that age.  Another person came and we talked, and she offered me a ride home.  Actually, I had been hoping to get a ride, even though it’s just a seven or so minute walk (walking fast).  I was afraid to walk down the street and be seen in public yet one more time, afraid to be seen as “fat.”  When this person dropped me off, she gave me her phone number, but I’m afraid to get too friendly with people at this point for risk of becoming friends and then losing that friend.

What I go through physically from day to day is miserable.  I wake up with a screaming headache and aching all over like I am in the throes of the flu.  Often, I have a bad headache and flu feeling all day that won’t quit.  I am constantly bloated and feel full even when my stomach is empty.  The pot belly makes me feel bad emotionally.

My ankles are filled with fluid from edema worse than ever.  The skin is stretched and shiny and seems to be getting cracks in it from stretching too much.  My ankles and calves have places on them that appear to be bruised or reddened from the stress on my skin. If I keep my shoes off for a long time, my feet appear puffed up on top.  It has already caused physical pain in this area.  I am lucky that I can still transport myself on foot and walk the dog.

While I sleep, and when I’m trying to wake up, I get bad cramps, or shall I say Charlie horses, in both legs.  These are not the usual Charlie horses people get, but cramping up of every muscle below my knees.  I have occasionally also had thigh muscles cramp.  In addition to my calf muscles, every foot muscle cramps.  If I try to turn my foot to relieve the cramp, my foot cramps up the opposite way.  This happens maybe 50 to 75% of the time whenever I lie down to sleep.

I’m scared cuz I have very few clothes left to wear.  There are some in the laundry, but I can’t go downstairs to do laundry unless no one is in the room, for fear that someone will comment on my weight, or look at me funny cuz I’ve gained so much.  The one pair of jeans that I’ve worn to death I’m afraid of putting in the dryer for fear that they will shrink, so I hang them up.  This means I have to wear the “fat” jeans while the one good pair is drying.  I have one shirt left.  I plan to wear it to church tomorrow, if I make it to church, and I hope I do.  These are special shirts that are loose on me and long.  Of course, I can no longer tuck things in.  My entire torso spills out over my jeans, never mind that if I were to tuck in a shirt, I would look pregnant.  While I am walking and the wind blows, I hold the loose shirt away from me so that it doesn’t touch my pot belly.  This way, someone walking by or driving by can’t see this protruding thing.  Here, breasts are to my advantage because they keep the shirt hanging away from my body.  Another option is slouching so that my belly doesn’t show.  A stiff shirt is better because it doesn’t blow onto my body easily, or cling to me.  It has been damp out, so I don’t worry so much about static electricity causing clinging. I can’t wear a knapsack because my shirt stretches and presses against my body, showing my entire enlarged torso.   Of course, I wear long sleeves, even when it’s hot.  I am embarrassed that my arms seem jiggly, which is probably a misconception because they aren’t fat.  I miss my skinny anorexia arms like you wouldn’t believe.

Of course, I aim to change all this.  I have already lost some weight, never mind how much.  Every day that I lose is a victory.  I would do anything to be as skinny as I was last summer, when I looked like I came out of a concentration camp.  I feel such nostalgia for those times.  I want that back like you wouldn’t believe.  Even if I die.

If I could be x pounds for only a day, and then die, I would trade it for my current life in an instant.

 

Wow, I sure am glad I am not locked up

I just mouthed off at someone real bad.  Never been like this before, ever.    I didn’t swear or anything, but you could say I was over the top.  I wasn’t shouting but I was angry and wouldn’t let her have a word in.  I didn’t even know who this lady was.  She was only doing her job.

This is not, not, not good.

I am so glad I’m not locked up right now.  If I had been in the slammer acting like this, they would have given me drugs for sure.  I would have refused them.  You know how these people are.  Or maybe you don’t.  They provoke you, say stuff that makes you feel like you’re shit.  I am not shit.

I feel confused cuz all day long I’ve been telling myself how great it is to be so much calmer off the Imipramine.  Now this.  All I could do was to sob afterward and feel very, very alone.

I wanted someone to be with me, but then again, I didn’t.  People who see me sobbing end up dumping me as friends.  Remember that song by James Taylor, “You’ve got a friend”? It’s all bullshit.  “When you’re down and troubled” is the time when you should NOT go to your friends for support and guidance.  They will run in the opposite direction when you need them most and you will never see them again.  This is NOT a time to call your therapist, if you have one, because they won’t call back for five or six hours, or not call back at all, and when they do, they will just yell at you for something irrelevant, and hang up.

I lay down on my couch and cried and cried and decided I didn’t want to shut up.  I have good reason to cry and I’m not bothering anyone.  No staff are around to censor me or give me coping skills.  I don’t want coping skills.  I want to cry.

That poor lady.

I am tired.

 

Tomorrow I have acupuncture

Tomorrow I have acupuncture.  I hope it works as well as it did last week.  It is my only hope.  Maybe by that time I’ll have my teeth brushed and I’ll be showered and dressed in clean clothes.  Or at least I’ll be dressed.  Haven’t done any of these since Saturday night.  I am relieved that the temps will be in the 40′s at the time, so I can wear my long winter coat over to the acupuncture clinic.  I hide my fat body under that coat.  I hide in shame.

Please don’t think of me with disgust in your hearts.  Maybe you want to spit on me.  Don’t waste your spit.

When I first became anorexic, I felt ashamed of myself for having such a vain thought as wanting to be thin.  At the same time, I thought that I was purifying myself and becoming closer to God.

Now I am scum of the earth.  I have eaten out of the trash.  I have eaten food that rodents have eaten.  I have eaten food meant for animals.

I admit I made a regular habit of eating Puzzle’s food.  Purina One junkie.  It would have been more honorable if the cupboard had been entirely bare and it was the end of the month, no more food stamps and I was being turned away from the food pantries.  But no.  I have rice.  Just in the middle of a binge, no time to wait.  I found out that if I boil it, it won’t cut up my gums, lips, and cheeks and make sores all over my mouth.  So I was regularly boiling up cup after cup of Puzzle’s food and chowing it down.  One night, I had to run out at 9pm, realizing that she had no more for the next morning.  Finally, I broke the habit, saw the stuff for what it was.  But today, couldn’t stop myself, dug in again.

When I boil Purina One, the apartment gets this weird dog food odor.  Try explaining that one.

Dog food isn’t processed with the same standards of cleanliness as people food.  Rats might be in those factories, getting caught in the machinery.  Animal by-products can mean anything.  Feces, too.

Protein, yeah.

It’s made with beef.  It doesn’t say the beef is cooked.  The stuff made with lamb doesn’t say the lamb is cooked.  Those biscuits made with flour, the flour isn’t cooked.  They’re just hardened.  The cornmeal?  Of course that ain’t cooked, either.

Okay, now I’ve convinced those of you who have been eating dog and/or cat food to completely abandon that nasty habit.  Hang this on your pantry door as reminder, next time you’re tempted.

Please don’t think of me with disgust in your hearts.  Maybe you want to spit on me.  Don’t waste your spit.

I’m a bit closer to God now that I’m scum.  I’m the  scum you see on the very edge of the street.  The kind that gets flattened by passing traffic, unnoticed, until finally, it slips over the edge of the grate, and into the slop of the underground city water, passed through secret tunnels, like the tunnels under McLean Hospital, and out into the Charles River, to be freed at last into the mighty Atlantic Ocean.

I suppose that’s where scum ends up.  In a scum graveyard.  A graveyard for people to put their faces and their shame.  A graveyard for people to empty their pockets.

Just stand there with your coat on.  Stand there and cry.

No real sense in it all, just need to sleep

So I don’t know why I’m up at all.  I got caught up in things, I guess.  I’m tired.  My nose is running a little.  I blew my nose into a tissue.

I have a hat on.  I’ve had it on all day.  I am cold, cold, cold, and shivering.

The rent is paid for another month.  What’s the point?  I don’t want to go on for another month.

Before the end of the month, I’ll be out of money.  Fine.  Money grows on trees.

My grandparents, that is, my mother’s parents, had a money tree.  I guess that’s why they were so rich.  Really, that’s what the damn thing was called, a money plant or something.  Our grandmother told us not to touch the leaves, cuz they’d die.

Touch me, touch me. Please.  Make me drop dead cuz I can’t stand this no more.

Just keep your mitts off my body, okay?  My body is private.  Keep off.

I need some kind of sleeping potion or something.  Are there any sites for the Kiss of Death?  Can you buy it on Amazon?

It took three days for Jesus to die on the cross. I want mine to last about two weeks.  Get sick and wither away for two weeks.  What illness can I catch that lasts for two weeks?  Some weird flu?  Where can I find it?  I’ve had a flu shot.  Drat.  I’ve had measles, mumps, the works.

Maybe I should just call in a Jewish King (who was it, Herod?  I don’t recall) and get one of those dudes to crucify me.

Naw, I’ll look fat up there.  Maybe I can get them to crucify me with my coat on.  Do you think they’d agree to that?  So long as nobody stood under me and looked up.  Well, I could keep my jeans on and not be naked at all.  Still, I’d look fucking fat.

Damn, can’t win.

Body Dysmorphia

I don’t know how to deal with this.  I can’t focus even.  Can’t concentrate.  It’s all I can think about.  There’s so much I need to do and I can’t do any of it.  Every little thing, even the simplest of them, presents a challenge to me right now.  It’s all because I can’t stand being over 90 pounds.  This is intolerable to me.  I cannot live with it.  I feel sickeningly obese and I cannot get this out of my head.  I see fat all over my body and I want to cut it all off.  All I see is this massive hulk and a tiny head mounted on top.  I see photographs of myself at close to 200 pounds and I see no difference between what I look like now and what I looked like then.  Absolutely no difference.

I was nauseous for hours this morning.  Lay in bed.  Kind of like I was in this weird ocean of fat, floating, drowning in my fat body.  I wished I could peel it all off like well-cooked turkey meat, and just be bones.

I feel like I am rotting anyway.  Left alone.  Sitting deep in the garbage.  Welfare scum.   Back ward mental patient.  Sick.  Sicker.  Dead in my soul.

 

Regarding my divorce from both the mental health system and my primary care physician, what this means, and coping with what today has brought me

I’ve just looked at my watch, and it appears that I’ve been out of the hospital a month now, as of tomorrow.  Wow, I’ve had a lot of adventures, and I’ve done fairly well, I think.  I made a bunch of decisions, one being to move away from the mental health system and find my own path.  I think many people didn’t think I dared to do this, or thought I didn’t mean what I said, or maybe they thought I’d change my mind.  Heck, I say one thing one day, another thing another day.  Nope, I have not backed down on this one.

************

I wrote that bit earlier and then realized that I needed to get on with my day, shower and get Puzzle out, etc, and then get back to this after I’d fed her and taken care of necessities.   A few things happened that distracted me.   No, I didn’t say “delayed.”  I used the word “distracted.”  Neither is a crime, when you think about it.

People with ADHD, or ADD, about which I know very little, talk about distraction a lot.  I don’t have ADHD or ADD.  One of my blood relatives has been diagnosed with one of these (I haven’t a clue which one, and I don’t know the difference) by a professional, I assume a specialist.  I do know that the “A” stands for “attention” and “D” stands for “deficit.”

Sometimes, I go off on a wild tangent in my writing, and then return to my subject matter.  Sometimes I delete the off-topic paragraph; sometimes I don’t.  There is nothing morally wrong with going wildly off-topic.  I don’t see anything morally wrong with saying things in such a manner that no one can follow my train of thought.  In fact, I see nothing immoral in speaking in a schizophrenic word salad.  If you don’t know what a word salad is, google it, or look it up in the DSM-whatever.  I’ll take mine with no salad dressing, please.  I don’t want the calories.  Better yet, a completely empty bowl.  Silence is golden, as they say.  Fifteen karat.  You do hear about guys that swallow rings.  Talk about increasing one’s self-worth.

While walking Puzzle, I realized that I cannot stay with my present primary care physician.  I cannot walk into her examining room and immediately be handed a johnny, and once I am changed, be ushered to the Throne.  Yes, you know what the Throne is.  No, Dr. K, I am not merely “x weight,” and this all-holy number should not be your number one concern.  I am here for help with my body itself, not the number that represents weight of my body.  I am Julie Greene, human being, in case you didn’t know.  What about my kidneys?  What about all the other organs?  This is what is going on in my body.  Why am I now telling you these things that happen in my body, and you don’t even believe half of what I say?  I suspect my kidneys are working at half-mast, and my digestive tract isn’t digesting very much anymore.  You can choose to listen to what I experience with my body, or you can lecture me about the Throne number, threaten me just like my T did, and tell me to come back next week weighing x, and threaten that if I don’t weigh x, you will section me.

Of course, Dr. K (addressing her now), you are, or were, shall I say, in cahoots with my T regarding the state hospital.  My T stated this, in fact.  I’m guessing you were all in favor of getting me hooked up with DMH, which would make it oh so handy to drag me, kicking and screaming, out of my home and into some “group home” out in the middle of nowhere, stuck living with a bunch of chronic mental patients who are just out of the state hospital and stuck in the system.  And now I would be stuck as well, buried and digging myself out.  Would I even have control of my own finances?  Would I have Internet access?  Would I have access to public transportation, and ability to get to church? And yes, you were all in favor of committing me to the state hospital as well, and being in the DMH system would not only send this commitment via Overnight Express Mail, but would put a seal on the envelope as well.  Nice and handy.  Nope.  She’s gotta go.

**************

Lots of other things floating around in this head of mine.  I get so many ideas.  Some people say they can type as fast as they can think.  Really?  Either they are slow thinkers or very fast at typing.

Then again, I don’t remember what time it was today that my mind ceased to work properly.  This happened yesterday as well, but it didn’t last for long.  Maybe fifteen minutes and then I came back.  Today, I don’t know…it has been worse and I can’t do things properly.  I got into it a little while ago, not sure when, and then never came back, or shall I say not yet.

Something is going on also with eating, drinking, and output (peeing and pooping) that isn’t right, that and energy and metabolism and how I feel physically in general.  I mean this completely aside from how I feel mentally about ingestion of food and drink.  My body is just screwed up.  My brain is part of my body, too.  I don’t think my body is sending the nourishment I consume to my brain.  It’s just like January.  Stuff shutting down.

Earlier, I tried to pack my things, maybe make an attempt to leave and go out for a while, but it was taking so long.  I kept on mixing up what I was doing, so I decided to take a break, wait till later, and then try again.  So I’ll do this now.  Wish me luck.

 

Human beings are two-faced liars

4am.  Pounding headache.  Half a painkiller tablet from a tooth extraction a year ago.  I gulp it down with a mugful of water. These interact with my antidepressant and make me sleepy.  Too sleepy.  This is so wonderful.  I must use these pills sparingly.  I don’t have many.  I will be asleep for at least three more hours.

If life isn’t going to be fun…if life is actually going to be nothing but hell…I might as well spend all my time sleeping, anyway.  Just stay in bed.

8:30 I am awake, and still despise humans like I did yesterday and every day since god knows when.

I fight and fight, but the people who are supposed to be behind me and encouraging me and supporting me, like my T, I don’t know…I don’t know what to think.  I told her all this stuff when I went in to see her yesterday, like about my ambitions, and how much better I was doing, but I feel like I’ve been slapped in the face, again and again by her and everyone else who is supposedly “treating” me.  They just put me down in every way they can.

Yesterday, she said if I starved myself one more time, she would put me in the state hospital.  One hell of a lot of sense that makes.  State hospital?  Great place to rot for the rest of my life.  I will rot at home, thank you.

No point in seeing my primary care doctor today.  She will only make me feel miserable.  She wants me in the state hospital, too.

If someone makes you a promise, if will be broken.

“I love you” is conditional.

“I want to get to know you” means “I want something from you” or “I want to control you or take over your life.”

“I will never leave you” is an outright lie.

Whatever a person says to your face, assume they are saying something quite different about you to another person behind your back.

Friendship is a scam.  Most of it is cheaply made and falls apart after brief use.  Don’t fall for this rip-off.

I have been in disguise.  Wearing everything I can to hide my body.  Scarves wrapped around most of my face, the bulkiest layers I can find.  This is the only way I can walk out my apartment door and feel okay.  Even answering the door or going to put out the trash.

People stare and laugh at me and I really don’t care.  There is no dress code in this country.   I sat on the bus and listened to people laugh and joke that I looked like a bank robber.  They didn’t realize I could hear them.

 

 

 

 

Someone tried to break into my apartment about 20 minutes ago

I was sitting here crying, having had a rotten night, about to send an e-mail when I hear this rubbing on my door, like a person rubbing up against it.  You know, this is nothing unusual here in this building.  I hear weird stuff like this all the time at all times of day and night.  It could have been the blind guy thinking he had arrived at his own apartment.  But whoever it was tried to open the door.  Like they were testing the door to see if it was locked or not.  Heck, I often keep my door unlocked, but from now on, I’m locking it.

Then I listened some more.  It sounded like this same person was trying all the doors to see if they were locked.  Most likely, this person is not a criminal, but some elderly person who is just a little confused and can’t find their way home.  I hope that this person is at least in the right building, because it’s damn cold out there.

I am home and sort of okay

Well, that about sums it up.

Quick update on Saturday, midday

I am in the midst of a longer post that I started at 1am or thereabouts on Friday.  Today, it seems, is January 28th, so I guess that would mean 1am the 27th of January.   I was in a funk for a week.  Perhaps a better, more precise or clinical term for it would be a  severe depression.  I didn’t get out of bed unless I had to, and slept all day and all night, waking intermittently, sometimes for a few minutes and sometimes for a few hours.  I believe it began on Saturday, a week ago, with the bitchy-headache mood that turned into the clenched-fist perpetual anger state.  This was how it began, I recall, in October.  This state dissipated and morphed into depression.  In October, the clenched-fist anger state lasted for a ridiculously long time and was intolerable to me, not only that but I was depressed at the same time!  I can’t imagine the hell I was going through then.  This past week was bad enough but I think it’s over.  I awoke at 1am Friday, or shall I say it had just turned Friday, and I recognized that I was beginning to become un-depressed…gradually…it was a start.  I began my blog entry because I wanted to tell you about my week.  I felt that it was important to share what happened to me not only depression-wise but with my eating disorder.  Progress on this article has been slow because of my irregular sleeping pattern that has been happening all week due to sleeping during the day and feeling a tiny bit better at night.  I tried to straighten out my sleeping last night, but unfortunately awoke at 3:30 in the morning unable to sleep further, stayed up until I was sleepy again, and then, unfortunately, was unable to sleep extra in the morning to make up for it because my DMH person was due to come, and I had to get ready for her arrival (in case she actually showed up this week).  When I woke up I was kinda pissed about this situation, and would have preferred to stay in bed another half hour or hour.  After all, I’m accustomed to staying in bed all day!  I had a headache due to lack of sleep that disappeared quickly after I took aspirin and I wasn’t in a bitchy-headache mood at all.  While in the shower I made up my mind: I wasn’t going to let this bother me at all.  I would wait forty minutes.  If she didn’t call, I’d split for the library and get on with my day.  No sense in wasting my time sitting around when I can be here at the library being productive.  I might be a mental patient, but my time is precious.  It’s not like I sit around watching TV and smoking cigarettes all day long.  I’m not depressed so I’m going to grab this time while I can.  So here I am, writing.

PS: It reeks of garbage again in the room where I usually sit here at the library. I haven’t noticed that smell since last Saturday, and I believe I mentioned it here in my blog.  Instead of staying in there and putting up with it, and possibly getting cranky, I moved to a different room.  I am happy to have discovered this new place to study!