Toward a Better Way

I’m bulimic. Or I was bulimic. I’ve engaged in bulimic behaviors. I was diagnosed with Bulimia Nervosa. I was hospitalized for health complications due to bulimia. I had bulimia. I have bulimia. I am a recovering bulimic. I am recovering from an eating disorder. I am recovering from an addiction. I am recovering, I am recovering, I am recovering...
This is something I have to remind myself of everyday: I’m recovering. It has become my new mantra. My life line, the one truth that I can for sure hold on to.
In May, my heart failed due to a severe imbalance of electrolytes. I was, as ironic as this sounds, at the grocery store at the time, stocking up for a binge--because I refused to leave a gaping hole in the food pileup at my own house, for fear of what others would say...
Standing in front of the ice cream selection, I felt the familiar dizzy spell come over me. This was common. What wasn’t common was the critically debilitating chest pain, or the sudden shortness of breath, and the fact that I was all at once drenched in a fine sheen of sweat. My vision went black, and I’d gripped the handle of the fridge in front of me, closing my eyes and pressing my forehead to the cool glass door.
Please don’t faint, please don’t faint, please don’t faint, I remember begging of myself.
But there’s only so much damage you can do to your own body before it rebels. That, or it gives up on you.
Mine chose to do the latter...
The next thing I knew, I was inside a hospital, a blurry collage of fluorescent lights running like broken egg yolks past my distorted vision. There were sticky buttons attached to my chest--I didn’t care that people could see my ‘fat’ body--repetitive wonky EKG readings printed from my bedside, trapped in a dimly lit square little room, makeshift curtain walls all around me. I could hear nothing, though I’m sure the emergency room was full that night...
Later, someone sat by my bedside. I came in and out of focus on our conversation. The person--doctor, nurse, psychologist; male, female?--was saying something about my test results.
“Gwen,” they said, leaning over me. Their face was just as much a blur as all the others’ who tended to me that night, “Are you bulimic?”
I blinked, trying to keep my eyelids open--fighting so hard to work against my body, still, after it had given up on me. In that moment, I knew that it was over for me, I knew that I was caught, and that they were going to make me stop. So, on a sigh of surrender, tears rising in my exhausted eyes, I murmured, “Yes.”