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What It Is Like To Be Taken Into Hospital Under A Section 136 Of The Mental Health Act

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 26 Comments

I honestly don’t know where to begin with this week’s blog, as lord knows it has been a fairly traumatic seven days.

I guess I will just have to start at the very beginning (a very good place to start according to a certain Maria Von Trapp), the beginning being Saturday afternoon when things with my mental health blew up like some atomic bomb (and by atomic bomb I mean a really massive nuclear weapon of mass destruction and total insanity. There was even a mushroom cloud). 

So, picture the scene, it is Saturday afternoon and I am with my mum in the car outside my house (as in the family home where I grew up, not the flat) and we were talking about the fact that from today, my parents are going on holiday for two and a half weeks. Now, I realise that I am 26 years old and should therefore feel fine about being left alone for two and a half weeks, but due to my issues I am incredibly reliant on my parents and in reality they are more like a pair of carers as opposed to members of my family. Indeed, as I may have mentioned before, my mum gave up work to look after me full time as my level of independence is quite low, especially when I am struggling as much as I am now, and in fact my level of independence has been rapidly falling in recent weeks because the noise in my head is so loud that I have been finding it hard to take care of myself properly. I also fear this holiday because due to my diagnosis of Borderline Personality disorder (or Emotionally unstable personality disorder as the kids are calling it these days), I have an extreme fear of abandonment, which manifests itself in me doing anything I can to keep people from leaving me alone. I want to write a full blog about this fear of abandonment thing one day but for now just know that the idea of being left by my parents strikes absolute terror into my very core.

When mum and I were talking about the holiday then, I became extremely anxious and things only got worse and worse as time went on. It was then after about ten minutes of conversation that it happened. I snapped. 

It is extremely difficult to explain what I mean by that but basically it was like a switch went off in my brain and I became so terrified of being left alone that I completely lost control, so the rest of the scene happened in a total blur with me sort of watching the action and what I was doing rather than taking part in it. As soon as the thing in my brain snapped I just started hysterically screaming and crying and then for some reason I started to lash out. Like I said, all that happened was a total blur but from what I have been told afterwards in this lashing out I ended up hurting my mum and then in an act of total wildness I grabbed her phone and smashed it in the road. Naturally, my mum was terrified so she ran into the house without me, at which point I was left alone in the garden and the screaming in my head got worse. As you know, I have OCD with an extreme fear of contamination and in my daily life I barely touch anything unless it has been antibacterialised before hand, yet at this point I was so out of control that I started actively tearing up plants from the garden, running my oh so perfectly washed hands through the filth and soil, ripping roots and flowers like a maniac. I could feel the dirt wedging itself in my fingernails as I grabbed at the earth but still I couldn’t stop until the point where the anxiety in my mind reached such a point that I realised I need to stop the noise and the only way I could see to do this was to end my life. At this realisation I ran from the house, sprinting faster than Usain Bolt on steroids, the only thought in my head being that I needed to end my life. I won’t tell you exactly how I planned to do this as I don’t think that is helpful for anyone, but just know that I ran and I ran, desperate to reach the moment where I could end it all and in turn end the terrible thoughts. 

For about half an hour I was running alongside a river, looking around in fear that someone was going to save me and it was at about this point that I saw the first policewoman. As I saw her I started to panic but she let me pass without a word so I thought I was “safe” and continued on. Soon however I reached a pub, and it was here that I spotted two police cars in the distance as well as two police officers coming towards me. It was then that I realised that they were here for me and I froze like a deer in the headlights. I wanted to run but as I turned I saw the other policewoman coming from the other way and I found that I was completely ambushed. Still I tried to escape, but the three of them managed to trap me in a corner where I stood crying and shaking uncontrollably. As we stood there they asked me a few questions and then told me that I had to go with them. Naturally, this was not what I wanted at all, I wanted to be left alone to die but I had no choice in the matter and after a few more words I was escorted by the police through a giant crowd of people in a beer garden, enjoying their drinks in the summer sun, and into a police car. It was quite possibly the most humiliating experience of my life. Once in the car I was then driven home, but as two police officers went into the house I was left locked in the vehicle with the third police woman who was trying to calm me down. I however could not calm down and this fact was only made worse when the other two police officers came back to the car and told me that I was being arrested for assault, and criminal damage against my mum’s phone and the garden. It was honestly like something out of a movie with the police officer saying that whole speech about how I didn’t have to say anything but anything I did say could be given in evidence etc etc. Desperately, I pleaded to be allowed to speak to my mum or at least give her a hug as I was so afraid, but the police officers refused and with that I was driven to a police station where I was supposed to be interviewed by a sergeant. I however, was far too distressed to talk, so I was taken into a police cell with a new policewoman, an extremely empty, cold and uncomfortable room with nothing in it other than a bench. Together we sat on the bench, me frantically asking questions and begging to go home but the woman would not talk to me. I don’t know how long we stayed in the police cell (it felt like forever) but eventually one of the previous police officers appeared to tell me that because all of my actions were due to mental health problems I was being “de-arrested” and instead sectioned under Section 136 of the Mental Health Act. It is likely that if you have any mental health problems yourself you will know what a 136 is, but if you don’t it is basically a Section of the Mental Health Act under which police can detain you if they deem you to be at extreme risk of hurting yourself or other people. This then meant that I had to go to a hospital, so without further ado I was placed into an ambulance, driven to a 136 hospital and then I was escorted inside by the police. Once there a mental health nurse came out to ask me a lot of questions but I was still so distressed that I just cried and could barely speak. Questions over I was then escorted to my room, possibly the barest room other than the police cell that I have ever seen. Naturally, because a 136 suite is a hospital where people who are trying to end their own lives are taken, there is nothing in the room that you could hurt yourself with which basically meant that there was nothing at all. Ok I have been in mental hospitals before but this was an entirely different kettle of fish, with nothing other than a bed nailed to the floor and not even a door to the bathroom or a seat on the toilet. 

I am sure the place was clean (after all it was a hospital) but because I was in a new environment it was this point that OCD kicked in and I totally freaked out. As I had been picked up by the police I didn’t have any belongings (they had searched me and had taken everything away from me at the station) so without my trusty hand sanitiser I was at a loss and started having a panic attack. Thankfully the staff were absolutely amazing and a kind HCA talked to me to help me calm down. She then went to find some anti bacterial wipes as well as a mop and bucket and together we cleaned the whole room. Even when clean though I was still desperately suicidal and at risk of self harm, so she stayed with me and helped me to shower and get into some clean clothes . Naturally I continued to beg to be allowed home to see my mum, but obviously because I was sectioned I wasn’t allowed home for 24 hours or until a mental health team could come and assess me, so to my dismay I had to stay the night. Thankfully the staff there were completely amazing and kept me safe until I fell asleep around 3am. 

I must have been tired after all the drama because I slept then until 3pm (other than a few five minutes during the night where I was woken up by the screaming of other patients) and at 3pm I was awoken by a nurse telling me that the doctor was there to assess me. From there I went in pyjamas looking like a right scruff bag (not that I really cared at the time…I was so out of it and traumatised that I would have probably been assessed in a penguin suit and not been embarrassed) to another bare room with a few chairs to talk to a social worker, a doctor and a psychologist. Naturally their main goal was to assess how at risk I was to see if I needed to go to a longer term hospital, but I was so scared of that that I am ashamed to admit that I lied. They asked me if I felt in danger or suicidal so I told them that I felt safe over and over again. I must have been convincing because thankfully they agreed to not renew my section and said that I could go home, which I guess takes me to this point right here, writing this blog in my flat feeling as unsafe and at risk as ever, all alone and traumatised by the past 24 hours. On the plus side, if any of you out there have ever wanted to know what it is like to be picked up by the police and taken to a 136 suite, now you know! Hoorah for small mercies! 

I am not really sure how to end this blog other than to beg all of you out there not to see me as a terrible person for all that I have done and explained in this post. I will admit I have behaved disgracefully and I am extremely ashamed for all my actions (especially hurting my mum who like I said I love more than anyone in the world and would never hurt whenever in control of and feeling rational about my actions) but I really want you all to know that all that has happened has happened because I am really not well at the moment and am more out of control than ever. As you know I was un-arrested in the end and was taken from the police station to a hospital, so please do not think any less of me or assume me to be some kind of criminal, as when I am in my right mind I would never behave as I have done this past few days. I cannot control what any of you will think of me after admitting this (I hate admitting it but as I have always said on this blog I am nothing but honest) but if I could influence your way of thinking whatsoever please do not think of me as some violent, nasty person, but rather as a person who is very unwell and struggling with their mental health problems more than ever. 

As I go forward after this incident all I can do is hope that I can manage to keep myself safe even though when I told the psychologist this, it was a lie. The next two weeks are going to be extremely tough for me as my parents are away, but thankfully I do have friends who are coming in to look after me and the crisis team are visiting every day. I hope I can stay alive for them and equally I hope that I can stay alive for all of you too. For now though, I will end this post and simply hope that you have all had a good week. You all mean so much to me and I am eternally grateful for all the friends I have online who supported me during this “incident”. 

Take care everyone x 

Handcuffs

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5 Tips For When Mental Health Carers Go Away On Holiday

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 2 Comments

If you struggle with mental health problems, there is a high chance that you have some sort of carer in your life, someone who helps you get through the day, someone who supports you through the particularly bad times and stays with you when you need. Indeed, carers for people with mental health problems can feel like people you couldn’t live without because they are so integral to your daily survival and that is how I feel about my mental health carers, my parents, although mainly my mum, who had to give up work partly to look after me because having a real job and the job of looking after a total lunatic was far too much for one poor woman to manage.
So if carers are so vital for life, what happens when carers do the terrifying thing and go away for a while, perhaps on a much deserved and needed holiday? What do you do then? What do you do when your person isn’t there for a period of time? Well, to be perfectly honest if it were me, I would go into a total panic and start crying hysterically which is funnily enough how I have been reacting in this situation for as of today both of my parents are heading off to Cyprus on holiday for a week, a week in which I am going to have to find different ways to manage my survival.

So today, seeing as it is so scary to have carers go away and seeing as I am dealing with this myself, I thought I would talk about how to manage, for I think it is an occasion that requires some kind of plan and is not very much like eyeliner in the sense that it is something one can merely “wing”…

Tip 1 – Make a list: Over the course of any one day, a carer can perform a multitude of tasks and when we try to think about all these tasks all at once and how we will manage them alone, it can become overwhelming. For this reason I think the first part to the plan of action is to make a list of all the things your carer does for you or helps you with every day or every week so that you can tackle each hurdle individually and set up a solution for every single one rather than throwing yourself in at the deep end with the overwhelming task of simply “managing everything” by oneself. If you are faced with a week without your carer the prospect can seem daunting, too many hours and too many tasks to truly comprehend but if you break it down into more manageable chunks it becomes less intimidating and also allows you to anticipate what exactly is going to be difficult when left to your own devices. For example, before my parents were going away I made a schedule of my 24 hour day plan and have gone through my daily routine picking out any issues to solve to avoid them springing up unexpectedly like some demented and rather terrifying Jack in the box…Jack in the box surprises are never appreciated, especially when you are living with mental health problems without a carer, so make a list and anticipate those problems before they can become an issue.

Tip 2 – Look into respite care: Making a list of challenges and things you are going to struggle with whilst a carer is away is all well and good but there is a chance that even when that list is made, things are still going to look incredibly daunting and perhaps unmanageable even if you break it down. When this is the case my tip would be to perhaps look into various institutions or options of places that you can go for respite care. It sounds a bit scary and dramatic but all across the country there are houses and facilities available for times exactly like these when a carer about to go off galavanting and they provide an option or place to stay whilst the carer is away so that you can manage living without them whilst getting the care you need. Crisis houses and specific respite houses will be around if you do a bit of research, although with this one it is important to look up these type of options as early as possible. Crisis houses may have spaces available more last minute (although usually there will be some kind of waiting list so getting exact dates is never certain), but respite care often needs to be planned in advance. Getting funding for a respite placement is another difficulty so this tip is not one without its issues (although if I could remove the issues for you please rest assured that I would), but it is certainly an option to consider or something to look into if tip one has left you still feeling that the idea of living without your carer is unmanageable. Indeed, personally I would say that looking for and going into respite care when carers are away is a great, safe and secure option that I would be head over heels for and going for myself during this week but alas because of late applications, lack of funding and various OCD reasons (like sharing bathrooms) this option is not available to me at this time and we have had to look for alternate ways to get through the situation….for example….

Tip 3 – Look into replacement carers: If like me, you find yourself incredibly intimidated at the thought of a period of time without your carer (even if that carer is away on a well deserved holiday that you fully support them in travelling on), but have not been able to access respite care either for lack of date availability or lack of funding (please insert comment about how desperate this country is for funding in the mental health department here), or OCD like complications like me where staying in your own house is preferable, there may be the chance of looking into an option of hiring or getting care from a replacement carer who can come and help you out in your own home and indeed this is the option that I am taking this week. The problem with this option is that it can be expensive hiring a nurse from an agency to come and support you, but luckily or unluckily depending on how you look at it, my parents have been so desperate and so worried that they have found the funds somewhere. Perhaps there are places and people who are eligible to receive this kind of care from the National Health Service (I know that the government provides hired assistance for people with learning difficulties for example, just not for people explicitly with mental health problems), so certainly check first to see if you are eligible for that kind of care but if not and if you do have the funds, my tip here is to know that hiring a replacement carer for a period of time is at least a possibility you may not have thought of (I know I certainly didn’t know this kind of thing existed until my parents ran into issues with my care for this particular holiday) and certainly an option to look into if you don’t think you will be able to manage being home alone.

Tip 4 – Make plans: When faced with a week home without my parents I shudder at the thought and my teeth chatter together like Scooby Doo’s after he has been through a particularly intense ghost chase. Thinking of all of those hours by myself/even with a nurse is terrifying, so as well as making a list of things you are going to need to challenge whilst your carer is away, I think it is important to make a list of things you can do to break down the time and give you structure. Being told to “survive the holiday” full stop is far too intimidating, so the key is to break it down into things that you are going to do in order to survive. Maybe this means planning to go on a walk one afternoon or planning a morning of crafty activities (by which I mean the arty kind as opposed to the sneaky sneaky burglar kind…no burgling whilst carers are in or out of the country please folks) but whatever it is make a rough plan for every day to stick to. Then, instead of “survive 7 days”, you will be faced with smaller and more manageable tasks like “watch a film for two hours” or “knit a penguin tea cosy” (other animal shaped cosies are optional but not advised). If choosing activities for each day is too stressful maybe simply write a list of ways to keep yourself busy, tear them up and put them in a jar and then when your carer is away and you find yourself at a loose end pick an activity from the jar and get distracting yourself with it. Either way time used productively is infinitely easier to manage than time spent simply worrying about where your carer is or what you should do to pass the time, so get a timetable going and make some structure for your time!

Tip 5 – Have a list of emergency numbers: In an ideal world, candy would rain from the sky, Donald Trump would not be president and your time at home without your carer would go swimmingly without a hitch but unfortunately we do not live in an ideal world (clearly evidenced by the current inhabitant of the White house and the lack of strawberry gum drops falling from the sky) and so we must face up to the fact that when carers are away, there is the potential for things to go wrong. Therefore it is important to prepare for such circumstances in advance by making a list of phone numbers of friends/family, support services, carers and crisis teams who you can call should things go awry. Hopefully you will make this list, hang it up beside the telephone and never need glance at it for the duration of your carer’s holiday but just incase things do go wrong, it is vital to have people in place who you can call on for help ready and prepared.

So there you have it! 5 tips as to how to manage when your mental health carers go away on holiday or at least 5 tips that I will be using over the coming weeks to survive my parents’ jolly jaunt off to Cyprus (they are going for a wedding…I am sure it is going to be lovely despite the fact that a holiday for my carers abroad is both delightful and terrifying). Whether these tips will be helpful to anyone else out there in a similar situation I do not know but whatever the case I thought I would try to help my pals out there and hopefully I have.
When carers go away it is always going to be scary but I will keep my fingers crossed that with these tips and that by hanging in there together, we will be able to get through. I guess there is only one way to find out…let’s give it a go shall we?

Take care everyone x

CarersAway

Dramatic Life Plan Changes When You Are Living With Mental Health Problems

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 16 Comments

You know that feeling where you don’t see a friend for a year (maybe they were backpacking around Australia or herding elephants in Africa), and then they come back for a cup of tea asking how things are going and you just sigh because there is so much to catch up on? Yeah. That exact feeling is the one I have today, only in this situation it isn’t that I haven’t written on my blog/spoken to you for a year (heaven forfend!). In actuality it has been a mere week since you last heard from me but what a week it has been and good lord with cheese and chopsticks do I have a lot to catch you up on!

Now, you remember last week when I talked about how I was about to go home after a five and a half month inpatient stay at my local eating disorders unit? Remember how I harped on about all the rules and regulations I had set in place to keep myself and my mental health problems on track and the importance of rules when living with mental health problems? Remember all that stuff I said about how I felt pressured to stick to the rules because if I didn’t there would be consequences including, but not limited, to my parents not being able to cope with me in the family home any more? (If none of this is ringing any bells I suggest you read the two posts that can be found, like aeroplane fire exits, here: The Pressure To “Get Better” When You Are Struggling With Mental Health Problems and here: Why Boundaries Are Important When Living With Mental Health Problems).
Good. We all up to date because you know that situation? Yeah, that situation has kind of sort of exploded all over the place and I have only been out of hospital for a week…

Indeed I can barely believe myself that it has only been such a short amount of time because so many things have changed. Like I said, I was only discharged last Tuesday, armed and determined with my rules and boundaries set my my parents to help keep my mental illnesses in check back home, but in this past week, all of those rules have gone horribly wrong.
From that first day back home my eating disorder looked at all of those neatly written out rules and laughed and I was smacked in the face by how much harder all of this eating malarky was going to be outside of hospital.
To be perfectly honest I do not understand it even myself.
For five and a half months I have been following a meal plan and now a simple change in location has completely thrown me off. I am not saying that I admit defeat already, far from it, but I can acknowledge that there is a serious problem and am well aware that, no matter how positive I try to be or how determined I am, I am currently unable to stick to the rules around eating certain amounts at certain times and not self harming that have been set.

“What is wrong with that?” I hear you ask “So you are breaking a few rules. This isn’t school, what are you worried about, getting detention or something?” I hear you cry!
Well no actually, I am not fearing detention but I have been fearing the consequences of me not being able to stay in the family home and in this past week it has come to my attention that me staying in the family home and living by my parents’ rules is, at this point impossible.

Now before I go on I would like to make it clear that my parents are not evil (well my mum is a little bit and she does cackle over a cauldron occasionally but that is a story for another day) and just because I am struggling with my mental health at the moment they are not kicking me out of the house. Far from it, they want and are doing all they can to support me with my insanity, hence why they set up these rules so that we could all try to live happily together, but to be blunt, they simply cannot cope with my madness any more for the sake of their own mental health (remember self care is important folks) and so me being unable to follow the rules has led to some consequences. What consequences?

Well, watch out because here comes a bombshell: I am not going to be living at home anymore. Yeah…I told you a lot had happened…

Like I said it was mere hours before we realised that I was not going to be able to live by the required rules and so, knowing that my parents could not cope anymore and that I didn’t want to put them through all of this again, I hopped onto google and started looking for a place to live. Mere days later I had impulsively used up my inheritance on a flat…yeah…I guess you could say things have moved pretty fast.

I don’t even know what to say or where to go from here because I am still so shocked and mind blown as to how all of this is happening and to be honest none of it feels real.

I am moving out.

I am in the process of buying a flat.

I have never lived by myself before and soon I will be living alone. WHAT IS HAPPENING?SOMEBODY STOP THE RIDE! I WANT TO GET OFF!

See what I mean about having a lot to update you on? Seriously, I have gone from living in an insane asylum for almost half a year, part of that time on 1:1 with a tube up my nose, to buying and living in a flat all by myself in the blink of an eye, and if I am honest, I have no idea how I am going to deal with it. Because of OCD and my eating disorder there are a million of normal every day things that I cannot do for myself from changing a duvet cover, to taking out a bin or washing a pair of socks and yet suddenly all of this responsibility is on me. Oh and how many Katies does it take to change a light bulb? THERE IS NO NUMBER HIGH ENOUGH BECAUSE THIS KATIE CANNOT CHANGE A LIGHTBULB. I AM GOING TO BE LIVING IN DARKNESS FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE UNLESS I GET SOME CANDLES WHICH I WILL PROBABLY DROP AND END UP BURNING THE WHOLE PLACE DOWN. I WON’T EVEN BE ABLE TO PUT THE FIRE OUT WITH WATER BECAUSE APPARENTLY FOR WATER YOU HAVE TO PAY A WATER BILL AND I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO DO THAT EITHER. SOMEBODY HELP ME FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.

So yeah…that is my update, THAT is the latest Born Without Marbles news and an example of just one of the dramatic changes of plan that can occur when you are living with mental health problems…
Obviously it will be a while before I actually move out and into my new flat (turns out that buying property is far harder and more complicated than buying cuddly penguins…who knew?), but eventually that is what is going to be happening. In the mean time I will of course be living at home trying to stick by the rules as best I can and trying not to drive my parents completely mad but who knows how that is going to work out? Then again who knows how living by myself is going to work out because the only reason I am leaving home is because I am too insane and the last time I checked insane people weren’t the best at surviving in this world alone. Thankfully, whenever this flat does come through I will only be a five minute walk away from home and obviously my parents are going to support and help me through this more than I am probably giving them credit for, but purple onions and gravy am I terrified and filled with questions. How did this happen? How did my mental illnesses take over my life so much that they have led to me being practically evicted from my family home and forced to live alone where I cannot interfere with other people? How will I cope by myself if I can’t even cope with the support of other people? How on earth is this whole moving out of an intense inpatient setting and into an isolated empty flat going to play out? Well, truth is I have no idea. I guess we will be finding that out over the coming weeks together…

Take care everyone x

LifeChange

The Difficulty When Mental And Physical Progress Move At Different Speeds In Eating Disorder Recovery

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 30 Comments

In a few days time, I will have been in hospital for 16 weeks aka a grand total of 4 months, and because of this, I am often being asked questions like “How are you getting on?” or “are you feeling better?” which are both very complicated and difficult questions to answer when you are in treatment for an eating disorder. You see, on one set of paper work, things are going rather swimmingly and I am indeed doing much better, yet on the other set of paper work in my opinion, I am actually feeling and am “doing” worse than I ever have done in my life.

Oddly enough, this discrepancy between paper works is not because I have two very different doctors with opposing ideas writing sets of notes about my progress, but because when it comes to recovery from an eating disorder, there are two very distinct and different sides to it, the mental and the physical, and unfortunately these two sides do not work as sleeping otters do (aka hand in hand – yes, fun otter fact for you, otters hold hands when they sleep to make sure that they don’t drift away from each other. Apparently they also make waterslides and play with pebbles. Conclusion: Otters are cool).

Indeed the two sides to eating disorder recovery are so separate that I think that asking someone in treatment for an eating disorder how they are, is a question that needs to be asked twice, once for each side of recovery, because otherwise getting one coherent answer is impossible.

To be fair, towards the beginning of my admission, the physical and mental sides of how I was doing were fairly in sync. Mentally things were a bit all over the place and physically things were too. This then continued as I struggled to work with the program at the eating disorder hospital, until the introduction of my NG tube and since that most unwelcome introduction, everything has changed, in my eyes, for the worse.

Before, when I was mentally struggling and didn’t feel able to manage food, I was able to avoid it which obviously didn’t help my body very much but it prevented my anxiety levels from getting worse. Now though, since the NG tube, I have a constant and unavoidable source of nutrition and it doesn’t matter how I feel, food cannot be avoided. If I don’t eat, the food still goes in, and consequently my mind is in utter turmoil. My body on the other hand is as they say “loving life” and ironically, it is killing me.

Seeing as food is unavoidable now, I have been following my meal plan in one way or another for weeks and the affect this has had on my body is dramatic. I am gaining weight faster than I have ever gained weight before (perhaps because I have never had such an unavoidable source of nutrition stuck up my nostril before), so health wise, I am “improving”. I am no longer at a weight where I require a wheel chair, I am now able to stand in the shower for long periods of time, even on one leg (I am a fantastic flamingo impersonator these days), and when I get out of bed in the morning, the world doesn’t swim before my eyes and go black. Objectively these all sound like good things and for the medical professionals and my friends and family, these are good things but to me, these are terrible things.

I really don’t know how to explain this idea to people who may not have eating disorders as I know that to most people it sounds absolutely ludicrous. Physical health, the ability to stand in the shower and walk down the corridor are abilities to be appreciated not feared, but when you have an eating disorder, these abilities mean entirely different things.
To me, not being able to stand up without things all going fuzzy was a sign that I was “behaving” myself, a sign that I was doing a good job at punishing myself so the guilt I felt at being alive was lessened. Now though, I am unable to “behave myself” by not eating because even if I don’t eat the food will go in without my permission, so with things not going fuzzy, it is like a sign that I am doing something “bad” (even if it isn’t always me who is doing the eating), and I guess I am feeling all the guilt and shame as anyone else would were they to do something they thought was bad, like stealing or punching someone in the face.

Now I take up too much space in the world and with the weight going on as it is I take up more and more space each day, which is something I have always struggled with. When you hate something you want to make it as small as possible (or you want it to disappear altogether), you want it to take up as little of the world’s space as possible so as there is more room for the good things. In gaining weight I feel like a weed taking up too much space in the flower bed and stealing all the sunlight from the marigolds.

It is incredibly hard to watch this body you hate, morph in front of your eyes into this thing that is getting bigger everyday, getting “better” everyday whilst inside you are all the more depressed and tormented.
I don’t have any idea if I am making sense here because to be honest I am on so many medications right now that my brain is not functioning but if I had to resort to the good old Born Without Marbles way of explaining things, aka an analogy, it feels like my body and brain are one of those cars people drive off in after a wedding with tin cans on the back and “just married” scrawled across the rear windscreen.

My body is the car and as it gains weight it is zooming off full speed. Meanwhile my brain is the collection of tin cans tied to the back, being dragged along and through all of this road that it is not ready for, each can bouncing and denting, bruising and breaking a little more with every mile that passes. My body gains weight, my brain cracks a little more, I feel more broken, depressed and bruised and the faster my body goes the further it is from my brain which is actually all the way back at the starting line. I guess this analogy isn’t perfect because you could say “but your brain is moving in the right direction like your body if it is tied to the car” but that is where the analogy fails because that is not happening at all, like I said, as the car moves the brain just gets battered and even staff have admitted that in the past few weeks things have mentally become worse and worse as time has passed and weight has gone on.
Christmas day is a perfect example of this. When I woke up on Christmas day I was weighed (NOT something I asked Santa for and if I ever wake up to a set of scales in my stocking on Christmas morning again I swear to God I am marching to Santa’s grotto to give that beardy man a piece of my mind…and his scales back), and I had gained a lot of weight. On paper then and to the doctors, my body had got “better” but mentally the shock of it all had such a strain on my mind that I totally lost it. Within minutes I was having to take medication to calm down from the anxiety and agony and when my family came to see me for our two hour visit, the visit wasn’t better for the weight gain, it was worse. It should have been better logically, my body was healthier than the last time they had seen it but in becoming that way I became so upset, distressed and anxious that I had what we shall simply call “ a little incident” and I had to ask my family to leave early.

It is that which I think illustrates my point best as to how impossible it is to answer the question as to “how are things going” when you are in recovery for an eating disorder. Am I better? In a way, yes and I am getting “better everyday”, but in the other more important mental side am I better? Am I progressing? Not at all. I hate myself more than ever, I am more unhappy than ever and I feel more trapped than ever in a body that I no longer relate to. The distance between my body and mind is so great now that I have asked staff if there is any chance we can slow down on the weight gain so that my mind has got a chance to catch up but they are refusing and it all feels like I am being dragged and pushed too far out of my comfort zone. I am in hospital being treated for an eating disorder and the physical problem is being taken care of by a tube, but the mental aspect is being torn apart and I really don’t know how much longer I can handle it.

It is so frustrating trying to explain all of this and I guess in the end the main thing I want to do at the end of this blog post is apologise because I feel like I haven’t made any sense and that I have wasted your time with my incoherent waffle. Like I said though, I am on all sorts of crazy meds at the moment (to calm me down because I am in so much distress due to this whole struggling mentally with the physical progress my body is making right now when I am not ready for it), so please blame those meds and not my inabilities as a writer. I don’t understand half the things that are going on at the moment so explaining them coherently is somewhat difficult. I really am sorry. I am just so battered. I hope this makes some sense at least or that I have got the point across in some way that physical recovery and mental recovery for an eating disorder do not go hand in hand and can sometimes be literally travelling in opposite directions. “How are you doing?” is such a simple question but good lord when you have mental health problems is it a difficult one to answer.

Take care everyone x

RecoveryCar