Episode 6: The Bad Doctor

Eating disorders are not about food and they are not about weight. So far, I’ve talked about my own struggles with perfectionism and my desire to please. I’ve hinted at depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, and anxiety. Many underlying issues fueled my own eating disorder, and such is the case for others who battles these diseases. Many humans struggle with body image issues, and many humans are currently, or have previously gone, on diets to lose weight. But eating disorders are deadly mental illnesses that need to be treated with serious care. The health care professionals who focus in this area are trained to think and to treat with this in mind. However, in my experience the general medical population seemed woefully under-educated in mental illness care, and I think it is safe to say that many of my interactions with nurses, general practitioners, and social workers actually made me sicker.

My mom, armchair psychiatrist of note, was suspicious of my eating disorder from its early stages. Though I was attending college at the time and she was two states away, her mental-illness-radar picked up on both my anxiety around eating and my early weight loss. Thus, she sought therapeutic guidance from my university’s wellness center. It’s important to point out that my assigned therapist looked and behaved like that one mousy character on The Office, Angela. We had some chill sessions where we talked through my desires for meaningful friendships and the pressures of being a music performance major in a top tier, highly competitive conservatory program. One day, she decided it was time to push into the whole eating disorder thing.

“Do you think you have an eating disorder?” She asked me one day.

“No. I’m just trying to be healthy and lose my freshman fifteen. My mom is overreacting,” I replied.

“Well, you don’t look too thin to me, so you’re probably okay!” She declared.

Hooray! All of my obsessive thoughts, all of my self loathing, all of my dietary restrictions? All of it was declared FINE AND DANDY by a person who was clinically licensed to declare things FINE AND DANDY! Did I step on a scale? No. Did she ask for a daily intake journal of my dietary regime? Nope. Did she bring up this very topic at any subsequent meetings? Not at all.

This woman was supposed to be trained to treat mental illnesses, specifically the disorders that plague college-aged patients. Yet she fully expressed and instilled on me the idea that in order to suffer from an eating disorder, you must be visibly and painfully underweight.

Hold. My. (Lite.) Beer.

Before being admitted to an inpatient eating disorder program, one must first undergo some basic medical measurements. This is done in part to ensure you are stable enough to take on the demands of the program, but also to obtain the evidence that some health insurance companies require in order to warrant coverage. Basically, you have to be the perfect amount of sick.

On the day of my admission, I had blood drawn at the local hospital. At this point, probably even my idiot therapist, Angela from The Office, would have physically acknowledged my diagnosis, and it had to be scrawled in my chart somewhere: anorexia nervosa. However, as I passed out during my procedure and had to be carried into a reclining chair, I heard the nurses joke with one another, saying, “she doesn’t weigh too much, does she? Hahaha!”

Really? This is a day from hell for me, being prodded and poked and forced into a rehabilitation program against my will, and you are going to make a joke about it right in front of me?

Writing this down decades later, I’m still surprised that medical professionals would be so insensitive to a patient needing care. I suspect that their behaviour was fueled by the idea that anorexics are selfish and spoiled, purposely starving themselves to achieve some ideal state of beauty. I was sad, weak, and in pain. I was not beautiful; I was nearly unconscious. In my state of illness, I didn’t need to be laughed at by those who were charged with my care.

True, this all went down in 2002. We’re well past that, and surely medical practitioners are fully aware of the anguish most eating disorder patients suffer. Surely they are now sensitive to the deeper issues that might drive an outwardly sane person to slowly push themselves to the brink of death. They can’t possibly still think we just go through this pain to match some capitalistic demand of outwardly beauty, right?

At present, when I go to the doctor, I still ask to be weighed backwards so that I can’t see the scale. I haven’t known my weight since 2002. I don’t want to descend the circles of hell that are anorexia, and I know a simple number can quickly become a destructive obsession. I trust my doctors to look at my weight and inform me if it is too high or too low, just as I trust them to interpret my blood pressure and white blood cell count. I typically say to a nurse “I don’t want to know my weight, I am a recovered anorexic, I am going to step on the scale backwards.” NO ONE CAN EVER LET IT GO AT THIS.

Once a nurse laughed at this request, exclaiming “it’s always the skinny ones!”

A different nurse in a different doctor’s office recently measured my weight, only to applaud me for maintaining the exact same weight for two years. Which, fine, could be seen as a congratulatory gesture towards my constant recovery upkeep, but I don’t think that’s what she meant because SHE THEN ASKED ME FOR DIET TIPS.

“Why can’t I lose these last three pounds?” she queried of me.

“Gosh! I don’t know Karen! Have you tried eating air for breakfast?” I replied out loud. In imagination land.

Also you are a nurse. I am in a your office because I don’t feel good. I don’t want to give you advice on anything.

I apologize if this post was a bit more soap-box-y than the previous ones, but as I mentioned in my About Me section, I have feelings. One of those feelings is this: I feel that eating disorders are real and dangerous illnesses that kill people; they need to be treated as such.