HWAMC #12 Hindsight

Enjoy this post at  http://ulteriorharmony.org/blog/2013/04/12/hawmc-12-hindsight/ ‎

 If you could go back in time and talk to yourself on the day of diagnosis, what would you say?
 What have you learned about being a patient that has surprised you most?        GO!

The response to either of these can be the same, on a certain understanding of "diagnosis."

Here it is: They've got your number, Ela. You might believe it's the wrong number, predicated on their system from which you wish to be a fugitive except in the case of incipient organ failure. You might not want to be reduced to a number. But the same number will keep coming up whenever you encounter "their system." Does that consistency tell you something? And listen up: here's the second part. Some of what they offer up is actually going to be helpful to you.

Yes, "they" "got their hands on me" when I turned myself in with incipient organ failure, couldn't stand up again after I got there, etc IVs in nonexistent veins etc no blood pressure etc ng tube etc... But within a couple days they had diagnostic paperwork for bipolar, and also for borderline, that they wanted me to look at to see if I might confess to one or book myself into the other. I was so mad, I wouldn't even glance at either one. All I wanted was for them to stand me back up on my feet and let me out so I could carry on not-eating, driving dangerously, climbing walls, etc. Three more months of treatment didn't do much to change that, but the realization did eventually dawn that if I wanted to be part of society in any broader or more universal way, I needed to be more than just barely on my feet. Howling/Haoleing in the Hawaiian jungle is fine for a while, but I want to be able to offer more.

So, what would I whisper in the ear of the frightened, angry, sad, very sick younger me in that hospital bed? I'd tell her that not only did these people, these "they," mean well (which she sort of understood already); they actually have some techniques and chemistries that really will help me. That if she'd opened those diagnostics and allowed these people who knew her so little to know her better, they might have offered more appropriate medications rather than blundering around with SSRIs and antipsychotics and making her even more scared of and disbelieving in medications, so that she might have had ways to feel better much sooner in her life. That diagnosis can actually be a relief, and a means to self-knowledge.

But I'd also tell her she's pretty much right about the inefficacy of anorexia treatment. She's not always going to be able to stay out of treatment, and there will be times when she stays out and really should be in. She should confess to herself that as ghastly as treatment centers are, there's a part of her that actually likes the safety and camaraderie of the experience, and she shouldn't beat up on herself for that ambivalence. I'd tell her she needs to decide very consciously how she wants to be about food and body, and should accept that that whole part of life will be tripping her up for ever, just as it always had. She needs to know that when not-eating becomes a full-time job, there's not much left to life and people turn away. She needs to know how to manage so that she's just being tripped up, rather than hovering close to death.

They got your number, a compound number, and it doesn't go away. But they are not evil, and can actually help.