Episode 4: Sh*t Disturber

The very fact that we sentient beings have developed the terms Hangry and Food Coma proves our inherent understanding that food, or lack there of, drives our mood, our energy level, and our ability to do things. It’s science.

My dad is a biologist and I took accelerated science classes my whole life, comprehensively learning important things about physiology, macro-nutrients, essential amino acids, mitosis, and stuff. Yet at some point in my illness, I became convinced that my body was miraculously designed to work opposite-style. In fact, I had quantitative data to prove that my body thrived on lack-of-food: the less I ate, the better I got at violin; the less I ate, the higher my GPA climbed. I logically deduced that for me, food did not drive my mood, my energy level, or my ability to do things.

Turns out, I was wrong about that. As I neared and achieved my goal weight, I came to delight in the amazing sensation that was my palpably increasing energy level. I wanted to dance, do cartwheels (I can’t do cartwheels), whip my hair back and forth, read books, and even practice violin. Instead of doing those fun and enriching activities, I focused this energy into one task: I pulled pranks.

In my 24 hour inpatient treatment program it was the job of the overnight nurse, who dutifully stayed awake from dusk till dawn listening for sit-up or spit-up sounds, to take our vitals every morning at 6am. Weight, blood pressure, heart rate, and temperature were all measured under her care. I imagine it’s not easy to sit alone in a dark apartment, forced to be nocturnal while quietly entertaining yourself for twelve hours. Plus, as any shift nears its conclusion, one starts to get antsy and eager to return home. As such, overnight nurses were never particularly gregarious, alert, or accommodating when we patients arose at 6am.

While the night nurse took my heart rate, staring intently at her watch while fixedly counting pulsations from my wrist veins, I loudly voiced numbers at random to confuse her. Deftly throwing her off her medical math game, this joke usually resulted in at least three more attempts at getting vitals before my giggles distracted me from my own antics. I should point out that nobody else thought this was funny. The other patients didn’t think it was funny, you probably don’t think it’s funny, and the overnight nurses definitely didn’t think it was funny.

I also invented an excellent activity that I dubbed extreme walking. After breakfast, those of us who were following enough rules and gaining enough weight went on a twenty-minute, staff-accompanied walk. In the winter, we did these walks indoors at a nearby mall. That’s right, by age 19 I had already become a mall-walker, joining the pastel-sweat-pants-ed, white-new-balance-ed, grey-hair-ed generation of yore. Extreme walking was nothing more than a drastically watered-down version of parkour. It involved spinning in a circle every once and awhile or adding jazz hands to my usual swagger. As a pièce de résistance, I would run a few yards ahead of the group and duck behind a large potted plant or an unattended chotchkies kiosk. When the unsuspecting group approached, I would jump out shouting “surprise!” Again, it’s important to note that the mall at this hour was wildly underpopulated and that I was accompanied by a trained caregiver, a portion of whose career involved making sure eating disordered people didn’t move too much during treatment. Very rarely did I manage to hide behind a large stationary object unnoticed, and it was even less common for my jump-and-shouts to shock or scare anyone.

I think my favorite prank was a rather uncreative one for someone with an eating disorder: I hid my food. Wisely, I never hid foods that were calorically dense or provided the consumer with much protein or dietary fat. For instance, I once hid a single apple slice under my hat. This looked ridiculously conspicuous as it was a very tight hat. After the meal, I excused myself to the bathroom and flushed my little harvest down the toilet. Two flushes later, at the hands of an unsuspecting, recently admitted patient, my contraband clogged the toilet. The poor girl was horrified, worried the staff would blame her for hiding or purging the offensive fruit segment. Again, my giggles quickly gave me away and, as reparation, I swallowed a teaspoon of EnsureⓇ.

Somewhere in the midst of this, the treatment staff started calling me S.D, which was short for Shit Disturber. I loved that nickname. In a sense, it encouraged me to disturb more shit, just to keep up the rep. To effectively disturb shit I had to maintain a decent amount of stamina, and in order to sustain that stamina I had to eat well and keep a healthy weight. And while I strive to make the point that none of these high jinks were well received, they were never discouraged. My treatment team, my friends, my family, myself; if given a choice, all preferred the annoyingly pesky Rachel over the personality-less, energy-zapped zombie version of my starving self.

There’s another reason I loved that nickname. I am someone who has struggled to fit into a group. In high school, I most certainly had friends, but they were spread among a variety of cliques into none of which I fit. As a tee-totaling freshman enrolled in a Greek-life driven college, I struggled to keep up with a culture that almost exclusively combined socializing with alcohol. By my sophomore year of college, I found a great group to hang with, however my eating disorder was forcing me into isolation and thusly put a damper on that, too. But in treatment I had a group that was forced to include me. We were together 24/7, we supported each other, we challenged one another, we went on adventures together, and we all had a role to play: the nurturer, the know-it-all, the naive one, and me - the shit disturber.