TRIGGER WARNING: This blog post contains reference to certain medical treatments that can be used with people with eating disorders, so if that is something you would find unhelpful then please do not read it for your own safety. If you are like the witch in the Wizard of Oz who melts when coming in contact to water, THIS is your warning to STEP AWAY FROM THE FLUME.

In both the mental and physical health worlds, confidentiality is a BIG thing. When it comes to your wellbeing, there are a lot of rules between professionals, your medical notes and what can or can’t be said in front of friends and family.
Want to keep that random extra hand sprouting from your lower back a secret from Aunt Enid so that she doesn’t start knitting you an extra mitten every winter? No problem, medical confidentiality has got you covered (unlike your third hand which is now not going to have a mitten for Christmas).
Don’t want people at work to know that you have a condition that causes you to temporarily morph into a teapot whenever stressed? That’s fine. Tell the doctor and they will keep that tidily hidden away on a computer protected with lots of codes and National Health numbers that would make your deepest medical secrets hard to find, even if people were looking for them.
You see, when you are dealing with hospitals, everything is kind of like some kind of James Bond spy film, it is all very hush hush, very top secret, very “who can we talk about your bunions in front of” (which, coincidentally was the alternative title for the 1964 classic “Goldfinger” but Shirley Bassey didn’t want to sing about Bunions).
Not only is medical confidentiality important though, it is also fragile, and like all fragile things, this unfortunately means that it can very easily, even accidentally, get broken.

My question however, is if it is YOUR personal medical confidentiality, is it ok/are you allowed, to break it yourself? Are you allowed to be “too open” about matters that other people would usually keep private, in the interests of raising awareness of those issues?
Not to talk about any single person or specific situation in particular or anything (THIS ENTIRE BLOG IS ABOUT ME AND MY VERY CURRENT AND SPECIFIC SITUATION), but is it possible I ponder, for one to be too open say, about a mental health condition and the treatment that may be involved as a consequence?

Like I said, we are not talking about anyone in particular (THIS IS ALL ABOUT ME), but as a very rough, vague and unspecific example, lets go back to Monday the 27th of November 2017 at 10:01am when a link to a post on this fabulous mental health blog you might have heard of, was uploaded to try and give a rough update to readers of said blog regarding the situation (or rather, the colossal mess of a situation) of the writer.
Oh screw it, I cant keep the secret anymore. Ok yes! You are right! I am talking about my blog aka this blog and my situation last Monday when I tried to write a post to tell everyone the latest news and was incredibly vague about everything, which is unusual for someone who usually speaks honestly and openly about everything personal and mental health related. Why was I incredibly vague? Well, because I was scared after staff had raised concerns about me sharing certain things on my blog, which really freaked me out and had me very worried and confused.

Thing is, when it comes to medical confidentiality, I kind of see it like you see a piggy bank, it belongs to you, you can look after and protect it, but at the same time, you and you alone are allowed to break it.
Were you to go over to someone else’s house, find and destroy their piggy bank and run off with all the money inside (or say medical details), that would be wrong on many levels. It would be theft, it would be a breach of someone’s privacy, destruction of their property and the murder of a perfectly good ceramic piggy. If however you have your own piggy bank and, after several years of amassing various coins of experience, decide that you don’t mind sharing those experiences and spending those coins out in the world in the hopes of making a difference, and consequently smash your own ceramic oinker to smithereens with a mallet…I think that is ok, because it is your property, your information to share, your little piggy to destroy (and then mourn over appropriately of course).

It is still important to be responsible for your information of course, and I don’t believe people should, as it were, shove their information coins into other peoples faces whether they like it or not.
There should always be warnings to alert people when someone is talking about a sensitive issue that could be triggering or harmful to others, so that they as a reader can use their own personal responsibility to choose to remove themselves from potential harm. Nobody should be forced on a flume and plunged into a bath of emotions without the opportunity to get their rubber duck out but similarly, if you know you melt when you come in contact with water, maybe don’t go on a flume.

Admittedly this is more complicated with things like mental health problems which can sometimes cause you to do things, read things and get involved in things you might know deep down are harmful, but we can’t all be silent about everything, and if Donald Trump is allowed his own twitter account then I like to think I can spout my nonsense freely and use my free speech on my blog in my little corner of the internet.
That is how I see all this, all the drama that I have been caught up in over the past week about what it is and what it is not ok to share, whether there are some things that should be kept confidential and whether you can or can’t be “too honest” about personal matters, and it is that opinion that has led me to just throw caution to the wind and write this post being honest about things anyway.
This is of course merely my opinion, and I am sure there are many people out there who will disagree, but there we go, we can’t all like mashed potatoes made by the same recipe, opinions vary, some people don’t like lumps, some people don’t like pepper and others don’t like to read blogs about people who talk about mental health (weirdos). End of.

So what is going on? What has been happening? What have I been skirting oh so daintily around for the past fortnight? Well I will tell you because like I said, this is my piggy bank and if I want to take a mallet to it then I damn well will.
Basically, as you know, I have been in a psychiatric unit being treated for my eating disorder for the past 10/11 weeks, but things were not going well and I was not managing mentally or physically with any of this recovery business. It was then decided that we had reached a point where it wasn’t safe to keep me where I was anymore (which feels so weird and confusing to write as I still adamantly believe that I am perfectly fine and do not need any of the things going on around me, but that is a topic for another time). Anyway, as a consequence of various decisions regarding my mental and physical health last week, I had a week or so away over to a medical ward, and, if this post is going up in time and all the professionals stick to the current plan, I will hopefully have been transferred back to the mental health place on the Friday before you are reading this.

When you have an eating disorder there are a lot of physical complications that can happen as a result and there are sometimes a lot of things that may need to be medically treated as well as mentally, but the main reason for this transfer was so that I could be fitted with an Nasogastric tube (aka a tube that goes up your nose and then down into your tummy so that you can be given nutrition without having to eat it yourself if needed).
Some eating disorder units can do this procedure on site themselves and many do, but the one I am in has been unable to until now (hence why a few weeks ago I was talking about maybe being sent to Glasgow or somewhere else across the country). With no beds becoming available in time though, I had to just pop off to get it done on the medical ward and have some treatment over there. Like I said though, if all goes to plan, by the time you are reading this, I will be back on the mental health ward, still with my tube for a bit now it is safely up and running, but working to have it out as soon as possible which would be nice, as I am not thrilled about this new accessory (I would have preferred a bowtie but alas you cannot give someone nutrition through a bow tie. Not even a sparkly one). It was this whole tube thing that caused the staff to get a bit over excited with the “shushing” (picture a librarian after several hundred cups of espresso).

If I am trying to see from their point of view, I guess I can kind of sort of understand on some level. For example, I know there are some people who might find talk of NG tubes triggering, and unfortunately there are occasions and certain sufferers/people who see them as something to take pride in, something that proves they are “really ill”. This is of course ridiculous as every eating disorder is equally severe and serious and everyone is “really ill” regardless of whether they have been through certain treatment options or not. Even if you have never received any treatment for an eating disorder you are as ill as someone who may have been in therapy for years, and the last thing I would ever want is to give a message on my blog contradicting that.
However at the same time, whilst a tube is something I do not think one should be proud of, I do not think it is something to be ashamed of either and that was what stressed me out so much last week. I was all there ready to go ahead and write as per usual, and suddenly everyone was telling me that what I wanted to talk about was inappropriate, which had me paranoid that I should be ashamed of what was going on or that this happening meant that I had let everybody down by “failing” to get better, and thus not say anything at all just to be on the safe side. To be honest I don’t think a tube is anything to feel particularly anything about. It just is. Sometimes they just happen to get fitted to people who have eating disorders to help them try and get out of being rather stuck in a highly sticky syrup/velcro/superglue bound/sellotape/plaster situation.

If you are reading this and think that me admitting any of this is to be too open about mental health/confidentiality breaching then I am honestly sorry, but like I said, talking about mental health and my experiences within the realm of mental health treatment is something I am passionate about both in terms of reaching out to others, raising awareness, breaking stigma and misunderstandings about various illnesses and overall making people feel less alone and not as weird and isolated as I did when I kept all of my problems bottled up and never had anyone to relate to. Maybe I am breaking a piggy bank, but it is my piggy bank to break and it has been my decision to be honest about it.

I won’t go on about it any more now because writing this much is scary enough as it is, but I hope in the future I will be able to write about how this experience and tube feeding in general has affected me and how it can be used in treating people with eating disorders. It isn’t a nice topic, nor is it a nice experience, but it happens.
Now if you don’t mind, I am off to hide under my bed as I do when I post all scary blog posts that could potentially make someone angry with me/get me into trouble (I also need to hide from the cleaner…that is one thing nobody warns you about when you get a tube…when you have one in there is a genuine risk of being mistaken for a Henry hoover and dragged across a carpet snorting crumbs for three hours…) I hope this has been ok, I hope having this tube doesn’t mean you feel that I have let you down and if not I really am very sorry. I promise I am still trying.

Take care everyone x