AtypicallyRecovering

Photo- El Arroyo in Austin, TX online photo

The summer before I started at the University of Illinois, I was working my second summer at a church camp I’d gone to as a kid for 7 summers (week long sessions). I loved that camp, and still consider it to be one of the most important spiritual factors in my life. Being outside and with nature is one of the biggest ways I relate to God. People lived what they believed, and it was fun.

I worked in the nature center the year before, as well as that fateful summer. The snakes, turtles, lizards, ferret, and raccoons were my responsibility. I was very self-conscious about my weight (as usual), and decided to use the increased activity at camp, along with calorie counting to get rid of what the ‘numbers’ said were wrong. I also felt I’d be largely unsupervised, which was important. That was back when women were supposed to be 100 pounds for 5 feet tall, and 5 pounds for every inch over 5 feet. That put me at about 135, which is NOT a weight where I look or feel healthy. I do not have a petite bone structure. I was also a figure skater for years prior to then, and my thighs were rock hard muscles.

I started off that summer by bringing my scale, calorie books, ‘expanding’ tablets to increase the feeling of fullness, and absolutely no common sense. Getting rid of the weight was THE most important thing for me to accomplish before having to compare myself to a university full of students. I wasn’t fat. I did have weight to lose, but I went off the rails. The diagnostic criteria for anorexia nervosa was different then. It counted the % of weight from the starting weight as the weight ‘rule’. I didn’t know that when I started out, but found out later (another future post). I lost a total of 1/4 of me in about 2 months. Now, it would be atypical anorexia. Face it- starvation is starvation no matter the size of the person.

What I hadn’t expected was an 88-pound anorexic with bulimic tendencies to be assigned to the same set of cabins I was, and became my guide to self-destruction. We became friends very quickly, and she taught me about laxatives for purging, the importance of exercising like a maniac, and how to avoid eating and nosey (concerned) coworkers. I woke up the first morning that we had campers (there was a week for staff only to get the ‘ins and outs’ of camp life before the kids arrived on Sunday). I ran down to the barn and back (2 mile round trip), and had an apple for breakfast. I felt great. I also was drinking about 6 cans of Tab per day (precursor to Diet Coke).

I lost 17 pounds the first week, and one of the counselors who went on “adventure camping” weeks (biking, river rafting, etc) didn’t recognize me when she got back the following Saturday. When people from the church I attended back then came to drop off their kids for a week long camp session, my mom would send ‘care baskets’ with body wash, quarters for laundry, and with the weight loss, a pair of rainbow suspenders to keep my jeans up (rainbow suspenders were a ‘thing’ with no other meaning than Mork wore them on “Mork and Mindy”). I didn’t feel any different, but got a ‘high’ from seeing the numbers drop on the scale.

The head honchos at the camp (direct supervisor, camp nurse, and main boss over the campus) knew something was wrong fairly quickly. They threatened to keep my paycheck unless I ate, but legally couldn’t do that. Over the next 4 weeks I lost another 23 pounds, and the nurse from the year before was in the area, and the camp folks sent me off with her on nights off, to talk some sense into me. She tried hard. But I was already hooked.

My folks came up to visit me (first time they’d done that, so I’m not sure if they were notified of the weight loss), and actually talked to me more than when I’d been heavier. Coincidence? Maybe- but for weight obsessed parents, I found it disappointing that I was ‘worth more’ if I weighed less. That was a big reinforcement of the determination to drop weight. And aside from the suspenders, they didn’t mention my rapid weight loss.

Over that summer, I lost 45 pounds altogether, and just had a couple of weeks at home before heading to the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. A third of my hair had fallen out, I was freezing all of the time, I’d turn blue, and other students on the dorm floor knew something wasn’t right. When they caught me after I’d gone to the water fountain to fill my water mug, I was in a light winter coat, jeans, and 6 pairs of socks in very humid central Illinois, in late August. My feet felt cold through the socks. They called the resident advisor (more senior student for one dorm floor, for those not in the US), who called the resident director (over the whole girls side of the dorm), and they shipped me off by ambulance for a night in the university health center hospital. I had to talk to a psychiatrist in the morning. I thought they were nuts. I wasn’t thin enough yet. But, the psychiatrist disagreed, and the diagnosis of anorexia nervosa was given. In order to stay in school, and not have to tell my parents I was in trouble, I agreed to the therapist. I saw her for the entire semester, and early part of the next one.

More on the University of Illinois “routine” with how anorexia impacted me in another post.