This is going to be kinds of a fucked up, un organized and possibly depressing blog that may or may not seem unfinished but it's what I got right now. I think it's time I talk about how I ended up back in Washington. Right before I moved back home I was living in Reno, NV and had landed myself in the ICU for the millionth time. I think I had gone to the ER for a toothache that had me contemplating throwing myself in traffic it was so painful. I was so relieved to have a doctor I had not had before and was hoping to get away with no blood draw and just some antibiotics and pain meds but one of the nurses recognized me and told the doc treating me that I looked worse than the last time I had been hospitalized. The gig was up, I was so mad! So my blood was drawn, critical potassium, critical bicarbon, critical creatinine, acute renal failure, the whole nine yards. I knew the drill, they knew they didn't have to explain it to me. Automatic admit to ICU and then telemetry. This was standard protocol for me. I had a new doctor once I was admitted so I wasn't happy. I usually had the same doc and he knew how to treat me but apparently Dr. D was on his day off or holiday or something so this new young hot headed doctor with something to prove was my doctor. He was crazy, knew nothing about me, knew nothing about eating disorders or how to treat them. I had been to the hospital so many times that I practically treated myself while I was there. The nurses looked to me to know what to do and what IV's to hang and when to stop them and what to infuse based on what my 4 hour blood draws came back at. I had created my own gong show of medical help that basically catered to my eating disordered. A pick me up when I had gone too far. I had my own medical team to save me, manage my eating disorder and then send me on my way until next time when we did it all over again. I'm sure they thought I was quite pathetic, but I refused to go into inpatient treatment and it was all anyone could do to keep me alive, each time hoping it would be the last time and it would stick and I wouldn't be back knocking on deaths door needing a recharge. I lived like this for 4 years. The last hospital stay before I moved back home was not that way. New doctor. Wrench in the works. He managed to load me up with 26 pounds of fluid water weight in 3 days. I panicked. I had Dr. D on the phone begging him to talk to this doctor and make him discharge me. He did and that was the last that Renown hospital ever saw of me. I was in new territory. In a body that I didn't know with a face I didn't recognize. I knew nothing of the person I was when I got home. For the first time in my life I could not pull my jeans up over my thighs. I didn't own an article of clothing that fit. The weight of all the water was more than I could bare. I couldn't breathe, I could barely bend my legs to walk. I didn't recognize my face when I looked in the mirror and didn't recognize the body I saw the few times I managed to look down. I cried constantly. I showered in the dark so I didn't have to see myself and cried when I had to wash my body because I hated the way it felt and could feel my painfully stretched skin. I remember calling Sandy one night shortly after and cried hopelessly to her voicemail. I remember saying that I didn't know how I was EVER going to make it. I didn't know how I was ever going to recover. For the first time I felt my own mortality. I knew, at that point, that I was never going to recover, that I was going to die from my eating disorder, because if "this" was what I was supposed to be aiming for, I wasn't ever going to be able to handle it. It was a trauma that burned itself into my brain and memory and has since remained there untouched, eating away at and plagueing my life. Even as I write this I cannot emotionally "go there". I can't emotionally connect with it. I went home that night after phoning Sandy knowing that it was over for me. If this was what recovery felt like, if this was the trade off and the body I was going to end up with ... I wasn't going to do it. I didn't know how to be OK with that. I didn't know how I was EVER going to believe that I could be OK. I knew, right then, my life was going to end. I didn't know what to do, I had never been "here" before. I knew with every water logged ounce of my being that I was not going to live this way. I couldn't do it. I crawled into bed and kept myself in a drug induced sleep for 2 days, I could no longer bare my thoughts. The eating disorder had won and I had given up. My best friend still lived in WA and I wasn't going to take my life before saying goodbye to her. I already missed her so much. 3 o'clock in the morning I picked up my cell phone, dialed her number expecting to reach her voicemail. I was too chicken shit to say goodbye to her in person. She answered. I didn't speak a SINGLE word, not a breath. It felt like days of silence but in reality I knew it was seconds. I inhaled to speak and before I could muttered a sound she broke this silence. I could hear the fear and urgency in her voice, "Jess, I'm on my way. Can you hold on for 24 hours?" Not a single word, she knew with that one breath that something was wrong. I told her 24 hours and not a second more. She literally hopped in her car, drove home, packed a bag and started on the drove from Seattle to Reno. Neither of us knew what we were going to do once she got there, she just knew she had to get there. When her car pulled up in fromt of my house I came outside and she hugged me so hard for a second I thought that was how I was going to die. We just stood there in an embrace and she wasn't going to let me go. I broke down and just sobbed like I had only sobbed one other time in my life. Uncontrollably I sobbed for everything all at once. My body shook as I sobbed for my life that I was losing. I sobbed for the person I used to be that I had lost. I sobbed for the hopelessness I felt. I sobbed for the pain I had caused. I sobbed for ultimate loss. I sobbed for the loss of my child. I sobbed for the grief and the pain and the trauma of that day, the last time I cried like I was crying in my friends arm. I fell to my knees, praying for it all to be over, for her to let me go. She never did and she continued to hold on long after I let go ... I knew she had come to take me home.
I like to live my life and mark moments with music ... a life soundtrack, if you will. This morning I was discharged from the hospital after a 4 day stay and I have found that life has come full circle for me. At the moment, I don't know how to blog about it. I don't know how to sort through the pain and grief and the struggle. I'm trying to find the fight and the will. I'm trying to find that strength to hold on for for a second, and then a second longer. My thoughts can't go passed the soundtrack of my life in this instant. I want everyone who reads this to listen to Mumford & Sons song called Awake My Soul. This is where I am right now. This is where my fight is, right now. And for everyone struggling to recover, ALL OF YOU, you better hang the fuck on and manage through this because I swear to God, after all the unbearable moments of trauma in my life, If I can hang on through this second and the next you better be hanging the fuck on, too. Listen to this song. Please find comfort in knowing that you are not alone, because I'm right here, too. I'm going through this mother fucker of a thing called life and as much as I want to, I just can't manage to let go. I don't know what else to do right now, but I know that.
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