Bingeing and Purging and Finding My Way to Happiness in this Storm

So it's really late. Blame it on the steroids, but I can't sleep (I also took a four hour nap when I came home from chemo, so could be that). I felt this overwhelming urge to write in the last hour. I have received numerous compliments and love from people all over about my last blog post on my sisters. I think that it resonated with so many of you because it was an honest message. I didn't sugar coat it with the assurances that we have and always will be best friends. I think many of you like the honesty that I put out there. As I told one of my aunts, I'm an open book and I'm going to be like a Kardashian with this diagnosis. Take it or leave it, my story is my truth. If it wasn't, I don't think you would be reading.
That is why I came to the conclusion tonight that I must share a part of me with the rest of you that not everyone knows, but many can relate to. It is a part of my journey that got me here, and one that I often wonder if it could have contributed to my latest health crisis.
My name is Jodie, and I'm a recovering bulimic.
(you'd think with the liver cancer I was going to say alcoholic, but I got you!)
I say recovering, because despite the latest ads out there touting finding a "cure" for eating disorders, there is no cure. There is awareness and understanding from the people that love you, but ultimately those demons live inside you for the rest of your life. Why am I saying all this? Well because tonight I made the connection that bulimia, anorexia, alcoholism, smoking....they are all addictions that we can never be fully cured from....but we can recover. And this not unlike my stage 4 cancer. For those of you that don't understand, once you have been diagnosed as stage 4, after the initial punch to your gut and hoping you don't get swallowed up in grief, you also learn that you will never be cured. This cancer, while it may be "stabilized" at some points in your life, it's probably going to come back. Hearing that at 35 years old, with a 5 month old that you want to see hit every milestone in life, makes it all the more heartbreaking of a diagnosis. I'm living with cancer and it is always lurking around the corner ready to pull the rug out from under me again.
But as I was thinking about it tonight, and getting somewhat down because I want to be able to say with all certainty that I will be putting Sam on the bus, I will see him graduate, and grow into the person he can be. I want to live to see him watch his true love walk down the aisle to him, and I want to hold my grandbabies. Although I want all these things, there is uncertainty now, and as I have continued to say, I must live in the moment.
But tonight was one of those nights where the cancer thoughts creeped back in. They start slow, and they easily can snowball if I don't reign them in. And I got to thinking about all the people I have touched with my story, and how I wasn't being totally honest with everyone. I've fought a disease that lingers, and I like to think I have come out on the other side.
How did I start thinking about my bulimia. Well, on Sunday night at dinner in a restaurant, I was overcome with nausea, and found myself overlooking a toilet bowl in the handicapped stall, and it wasn't the first time. The memories came flooding back of the hundreds of times before I had sat of the pool of water, looking at my reflection, wanting so badly not to beat myself up, but still not liking what I saw in that water.
I can still remember the first time I vomited. It was my freshman year of college. I was so lost. I never felt like I fit in there. I wasn't a complete weirdo but I wasn't at all the type to sell my soul to a sorority. I just couldn't do it. I gained weight and found solace in food at the neverending cafeteria options. Was I skinny to begin with? No. I had always struggled with my weight (or at least I thought I did). From about 3rd grade on I became aware of the pressures of society on women to look a certain way. I remember a teacher brought a scale into the classroom that was going to way us in kilograms or whatever the metric term was and had us line up and compare weights. I'm 35, and I remember dreading that line like it was yesterday. Or how about paying what you weigh for a kid's meal? I had convinced myself that I weighed more than the meal cost, and refused to step on the scale. I look back at pictures now and I see a little girl that was so beautiful, so funny, yet wouldn't open her mouth because she was fat in her eyes.
Being a bulimic is far from glamorous. Those first few times trying to sneak around to binge and then purge out the ugly took a toll on me. The heaving, the splashing of food all over you, the smell. It was all so disgusting, but I saw results. If I didn't like something about myself that day, I could stuff my face, feel the comfort for just a few minutes, then punish the crap out of myself by drinking a quart of water and watching it all splash into the toilet. With one flush, the insults, the crazy thoughts, the ugliness was gone....for just a few moments. Then I would retreat to my room for a nap, no matter how short, because I was exhausted from the heaving and the hiding. My body was getting skinnier, but I wasn't getting happier. I was becoming obsessed.
I planned my day around bingeing. I knew where secret bathrooms were. I weighed myself incessantly. Going out to dinner was never fun anymore, because as soon as I was done I was fidgety and downright mean about getting myself to a bathroom to rid myself of the demon. It had overtaken my head. The laughter was gone. I wasn't a person. I was a shell.
My parents eventually found out, but no one knows the "right" way to deal with a bulimic. This was not their fault, but they wanted me to stop. My dad would bang on the bathroom door. He would beg me to stop. I was taking diet pills too, trying to speed up my metabolism at this point. I was playing with fire.
Friends stopped interacting with me, for their own well-being or because I wouldn't listen to them. They knew what was going on, they confronted me. I had people crying to me because friends had died....I was an impenetrable shell. No one was going to stop me, this disease had taken hold and I was right in the thick of it. I didn't care who stopped talking to me, who was disgusted by me. This was going to be my path to happiness. So I could look in the mirror and like what I saw.
But we all know, it wasn't. I started to see blood when I was vomiting. I was sweating gobs of water in 30-degree weather. I could not make it through a day of classes my senior year, without at least two naps. I snapped at people when they tried to eat some of my food. if they interfered with my routine. I had lost myself to bulimia, and didn't know how to turn back.
There was no one thing that snapped me out of it. It was a gradual process. The blood scared me. My heart racing, petrified me. Doctors never caught on, I was good at dodging appointments and I came across as so strong-willed, no one suspected that I would have caved to bulimia. I was a smart girl, straight-A student, a perfectionist, a people-pleaser. (Hello, that is the definition of bulimia in the dictionary!)
The truth is, I had to want my own recovery. I had to want to deal with what got me there. Eventually I couldn't keep it up. My relationships were failing, I wasn't myself, and I was scared of my body starting to turn on me, which it was. And I came to the conclusion that I wanted to live my life, not destroy it.
It was a gradual process of climbing out of the darkness of what my life had become; an endless round of bingeing and purging only to get back on that merry-go-round the next day and adding work and school to the mix. When I realized I wasn't trapped, I was in charge here that is when the healing began. I started by going to therapy and dealing with all my inside thoughts that drove me to not like what I saw, who I was. I began slowly taking my life back. Did I gain weight? You bet! Was it hard...in one word, yes. I had to relearn how to love myself. How to see me for what others saw me. What they were missing from me. The light in my eyes had to come back and the compulsiveness had to go.
I have been in recovery for over ten years now. That is not to say that those gnawing feelings don't come hurling back at times. I spent my whole pregnancy looking away from the scale and doing it because I wanted to be healthy for my baby. I have dabbled in the bingeing and purging on a few occasions, those occasions where I felt I needed control or was unhappy. But I am happy to say I always found a good support system, no matter where I was. And I have also found solace in sharing my story. Maybe that's why I like teaching and helping others, because I remember that scared little girl who wanted nothing more than to be like everyone else. It was when I learned that being me was the actual reason for living, I turned my life around.
The whizzing numbers on a scale still make me cringe. And going to chemo every time is fun because they got to check that good ol' weight. But I keep my eyes wide open and can admit I'm heavier than I have ever been. But they WANT me to stay at a fighting weight! Woohoo!
In all seriousness, I have to bring this back to cancer. That's why you are all following me anyway. And there is a method to my madness here. You see, I was told I would never be cured of bulimia. That I would always be in recovery. It too, like cancer, lurks in the dark places of my mind. But bulimia has not gotten me down again. In fact, quite the opposite, it has helped me to help others struggling with self-esteem, especially as a teacher. I may always be in recovery, but it is something that a positive attitude, surrounding myself with the right people, and having the support of so many that has helped me to survive.
I, too, will never be cured from cancer, at least that is what they tell me. And that is one hard pill to swallow. But if you start looking at it from my perspective and where I have been and what I have fought to regain, I know this journey is far from over. I have to have faith, I have to believe in myself, and I have to trudge that long road with a smile on my face. Sitting in the corner, rocking and crying myself to sleep will get me no where on that path. Loving myself and seeing that there is so much left to fight for, to live for, to be here for, that is what I am packing in my Mary Poppins carpet bag and bringing along with me for the ride. I'm proof that you are the person in charge, and you are the only one that can do it. Push out the negative, fight for the positive and hold onto your dreams.
We went to see Saving Mr. Banks the other night. And I won't quote the line totally correctly, but a character said, "You have to live in the moment. You can't get looking at the future. That's what gets you in to trouble." And he was right. When I let myself get bogged down with the "what ifs" and "If I don't make it..." I will never live in the moment.
My bulimia journey taught me I am a fighter, and there is so much to live for and see and do. I beat that on my own, and I have a hell of a lot of support in my corner now ready to pick me up when I fall down in that court of life.
The "C" word is nothing like bulimia, and I know that. It is a ravenous beast that preys on negativity and wants you to cave. But don't cave my friends. Fight the good fight. Get the last word in. Put your faith in yourself....because you are your biggest fan. I'm living with the scars of bulimia, and I am living with the scars of cancer. But there is one thing I have learned, just because you can't be "cured" doesn't mean you are down for the count. You can get this....and guess what you will. We all got this!