Trigger warning: This post mentions the eating disorder behaviour of distorting your weight from professionals, so if that would trigger you then flee! Flee I say!

When I was younger, I was always taught not to trust someone who promises to give me sweets if I climb into the back of their van (unless of course those sweets involve any kind of combination of chocolate and peanut butter in which case who cares about potential kidnap, get in the damn van and don’t let those beauties drive away).
Unfortunately, somewhere in my brain as I have got older, “don’t trust strangers with sweets in a van” has morphed into “don’t trust psychologists” (regardless of whether or not they drive a van containing a portable candy heaven). Turns out however that when psychologists say they are going to do something and give you ultimatums, you should believe them.

Since coming out of hospital post “appendix explosion gate”, every week in my eating disorder appointments my psychologist has been telling me that I need to increase my intake in order to regain the weight I lost. To be fair, I have been trying, but a problem I have is that unless someone gives me specific deadlines for things I am scared to do, I will procrastinate until my arms fall off and tentacles grow in their place (not eight tentacles like an octopus though…that seems a little excessive…four is enough for me thanks.)

Every time my psychologist would tell me to increase I would hear her, try, but ultimately think “it is fine, she will just say the same next week and I will do it then”. Two Tuesdays ago though, my psychologist gave me a proper ultimatum with proper dates and deadlines by which I had to carry out her instructions. I was given one week to gain a certain amount of weight with the alternative being that I would be recalled back into hospital under the Mental Health Act. Seeing as how my brain works, you would think that this fairly clear statement would be easier to adhere to than the alternative casual “you need to eat more”, but still my head found ways to procrastinate, not because I wasn’t listening, but because I didn’t believe her. This was a mistake.

As much as I know I am mentally not very well at the moment in some aspects, physically I am finding it hard to see that there is a problem at all. Hearing threats and statements about my health that are designed to scare me, therefore make little sense. It is like telling someone over and over again that they are going to die of alcohol poisoning and that their liver is failing because of alcohol when they know that this can’t be the case because they haven’t touched a drop of liquor in their lives.

Back home I tried to increase but I was so scared of gaining weight that it didn’t go well, partly because I didn’t believe the “consequence” I was told about were I to fail to do so. Still, I didn’t want my psychologist to be disappointed or angry with me for failing her, so on the morning of weigh in I drank the weight I had needed to gain in water so that the scales would show the increase required and keep everyone happy. I hate “water-loading” before weigh in (aka the behaviour some people with eating disorders do whereby they drink a lot of water prior to weigh in to manipulate their weight on the scales and prevent therapists from knowing their true weight). It always freaks me out because even though I can know that I have just drunk water, whenever I see the number go up on the scales, my head will convince me that it is real weight and not just excess fluid swishing about in my bladder.

Thus I stepped on the scales prepared to be triggered, but somehow, it didn’t work, and I saw that I had not reached the goal set for me at all. Initially I didn’t really panic because I thought as always that my psychologist had been lying and that I could get out of it. I thought I could easily insist that I would just “meet the target” next week, but she hadn’t been lying and to my utter shock and horror, I couldn’t get out of it. What happened next? Well, considering I am writing this at a hospital desk in an inpatient eating disorder unit, I think you can guess. That’s right, that is the update this week, Born Without Marbles is back in the loony bin, and to be blunt, it sucks.

People keep saying things like “at least you know the place” and “you have done it before” but that doesn’t serve as much comfort because even though I know that, this time it feels different, so unnecessary and therefore scary. If you believe there is a physical problem it is easier to understand the need to take the medicine needed to cure it (in my case that medicine being “Food/general nosh”), but this all feels like one terrible mistake. I don’t need to be here and thus I do not need the medicine.

I am almost waiting for ward round on Tuesday where everyone discusses how things are going and for them all to turn around, apologise for the inconvenience and send me on my way.

The scales may say that I am under my CTO weight (a full explanation of the Mental Health Act and CTO’s can be found here: Demystifying The Mental Health Act…With Penguins, but basically a CTO is a legal document under which you are sectioned but allowed to live in the community as long as you adhere to certain conditions aka in my case, stay above a certain weight), but I don’t think I have actually lost any weight. I can read the scales and everything so I know that the number is lower but I am 100% sure that this is purely because I had my appendix removed and thus the weight of a whole organ has gone. If you chop someone’s arm off their weight is obviously going to go down but it doesn’t mean they have lost “weight” all over, it just means that there is some rude reckless person running around cutting people’s arms off.

I am so scared in here and I don’t know what to do. I am trying my very best to work with people and “listen to the professionals” but it is harder than I thought. Trusting them feels the same as trusting all those terrifying people with vans and sweets when I was a child (especially that particularly frightening lollipop obsessed child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang…seriously if you ever need to teach kids that “don’t get into vans with sweets lesson” just show them that film and you will be sorted…of course they will also learn that cars can fly and that dressing up as a Jack in the box will get you through security at a royal palace, but I think the worth of the sweets lesson trumps the potential misinformation spread by the latter).

So yeah…Mental health awareness lesson of the week: trusting professionals with medical degrees and things who should technically know more than you is hard when you have mental health problems. Very hard.

Other than that, I don’t really know what to say today. I just want to go home. I feel I should write an extra good, extra long blog today considering I am in hospital and certainly have free time to write but the words won’t come. Maybe I should offer them some sweets as encouragement.
I am also struggling to keep this update upbeat rather than explode all over you, so I think I will sign off for now and hope that I am a little bit more coherent in the next post. Sorry.

Take care everyone x