Forget the statistics, forget case studies and forget guestimations - Eating Disorders kill people, real people; friends, family, that girl you see stalking the aisles of Sainsbury's, that guy at the dirty club you go to on a Friday night, and the people you didn't even know had anything wrong with them at all. All of them can slip away at any time
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A few days ago, off on a twenty-mile walk to compensate for a chocolate bar that I had eaten in what I saw as a disgusting moment of weakness, I started to get chest pains. Strange squeezing pains. It was then that it hit me: what if there is something going wrong with my heart? What if I die? And the answering voice came back, "No, you're only at risk of cardiac arrest if you're emaciated and purging often. You don't purge all that much and you're not even that thin. Shut up and get on with it."
I have always believed that it would never happen to me. Even now, reading this, I'm thinking, "But I've never been ill enough to be admitted to hospital. I'm an outpatient. She's talking about the inpatients. They're the ones at risk from this, not me."
I want to be thin, but I don't want to die. I am scared. I don't know what to do with the fear. I have reached out for help, but help isn't readily available where I live. I was on a waiting list for six months just to get assessed. The 'help' that followed was rubbish - a box of Fluoxetine and appointments with a CPN who has no knowledge of eating disorders and who tells me I obviously don't want to get better as I'm not sticking to my meal plan. (How can I stick to it without help??) So even if I decide I really want to go for recovery 100%, what happens next?
And that feeds back into the ED: "You can't be at risk of death. If you were you would qualify for more treatment. Carry on."
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