Sorry I haven’t posted in like 2 weeks, but its because I have been using my mom’s computer for the past few months since the battery in mine has not been functional. I should be able to post my next post sometime this weekend because on Friday I will be getting a new batter for my computer.
But until then, please be patient with me!
A lot has happened this year in my life. So as I reminisce, I want you to look at all of the good, the bad, the beyond amazing, and the down right shitty things that have happened for you this past year.
The Beyond Amazing: I GRADUATED FROM HIGH SCHOOL AND WAS ACCEPTED INTO UNIVERSITY!
The Bad: Basically everything relating to the fact that I had cancer such as, hair loss, nausea, having a giant needle shoved into my hip while they were sedating me (Bone Marrow Biopsy), having to drive a half an hour away to see a doctor weekly for just over 3 months, drinking Iodine Contrast (basically felt like I was drinking poison), having about $15,000 worth of procedures and tests done within a week, and just the fact that I spent my summer being sick instead of seeing friends and getting ready for University. My parents, in effort to save money, clearing out our storage unit into our living space and then always having an excuse of why they haven’t gone through any boxes. Our living room has been our storage unit for 5 months. Just this past month we were finally able to sit at our dining room table, mostly because there was a leak in our ceiling and things got wet and needed to be thrown away. Other than that we have not been able to sit on our couch. The main reason I decided not to do the 3 more months of chemotherapy was because if I was going to be confined to our townhouse I did not want to be confined in my room because there was no where else for me to comfortably be. Sounds Stupid but the first 48 hours after chemo are me taking anti-nausea pills like they are candy, sleeping, having to maintain fluid intake, sleeping some more, trying to eat anything without feeling the need to vomit, feeling dizzy and shaky because of lack of food intake, and potentially a low grade fever. So after those 48 hours have passed I would start feeling a little better and take a shower and go downstairs to heat up some soup, which takes a lot of energy. With all of the chemo the fatigue sucked and exacerbated my chronic joint pain so walking up and down stairs was not ideal. There really wasn’t anything for me to do downstairs except eat my food in the kitchen and then go back upstairs to my room. I couldn’t have people over because it was a mess so I really lacked motivation to do much of anything. Having an Eating Disorder is still a struggle, but I have only purged 2 times this entire year but I have taken laxatives at least once a month.
The Good: My insurance covered all of my tests, surgeries, and chemotherapy, which was really expensive (like $70,000 expensive). My mom got a new job working at a hospital so now we have private insurance. I now basically have more freedom to go see doctors that I want to instead of a select few but now I will have to pay a co-pay and a deductible. The University I am going to be going to in the fall 2017 has been great with helping me figure out next year (other than the financial aid office but I’ve heard they always suck). My mom is still my best friend even though she makes me angry. I had another year free from Self harm. I found a primary care that I like and understands that I am smart and research. I have progressed with my trauma narrative and I have an amazing person who has been meeting with my therapist almost every other week going over what I’ve written. I have an amazing therapist who I kinda wish wasn’t my therapist and was my older sister instead. I have only had 2 Emergency Room visits this year (both were for pain). I had several amazing experiences with my high school choir, like taking a trip to St. Louis, Missouri.
The Down-Right Shitty: I was diagnosed with a rare form of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and had to postpone going to University to do treatments that made me feel like crap.
*Trigger warning read at your own risk* I am putting a trigger warning on here because I am going to be talking about eating disorders. I do not promote eating disorders I just have one.
I was diagnosed 2 years ago with an Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (EDNOS) after having 2 fainting spells at school. I was dehydrated from not drinking fluids and purging (making myself vomit) and my body didn’t have enough nutrients to maintain consciousness. Fainting is scary especially when your are going in and out of consciousness and it is also kind of embarrassing when you faint in front of your entire class.
Let’s go back a lot further to when I first started having an unhealthy relationship with food and body image. I was about 8 years old. I had become less active due to the beginnings of my chronic joint pain (we still don’t know what is causing it and all of the doctors I have seen about it blame it on me having depression) so I started to gain weight. I was no longer a skinny bony child I was overweight but not significantly. I still wanted to be active and do gymnastics but my dad stopped allowing me to do it because I was “bigger than the other girls.” My dad would tell me I was bigger and I knew that it was his way of calling me fat without saying fat. My brother would just call me fat and my dad wouldn’t say anything about it. So I started skipping meals. I would say I wasn’t feeling well or sleep through dinner. Neither of my parents said anything or showed any concern. I would starve myself for days at a time and they didn’t notice. They noticed everything I did wrong or that my brother told them I was doing wrong and I was just a fish out of water. They didn’t listen to me and they seemed to only care about my brother.
During this time I was also sexually assaulted/abused. I did tell my parents but they didn’t believe me, and because of their disbelief of what I told them, they don’t remember (which is a another bundle of emotions). This person made sure to tell me how insignificant I was and held what he did over my head constantly.
The restricting of eating gave me control over something that only I had control over. My parents couldn’t force me to eat so I wouldn’t. The thing is, I didn’t lose a significant amount of weight during my childhood restrictions on eating.
Then middle school came. I still went back and forth with restricting and eating but it got worse during 8th grade. My parents had me in therapy since I told someone that I wanted to kill myself and I had started cutting so instead of trying to talk to me about any of it they made me feel even worse about myself and then paid someone to deal with me. They still didn’t care to listen to what I was trying to tell them and they just accused me of being attention seeking and learning how to self harm from the internet (them not knowing that I had been self harming for years before that).
Then High School came. It’s important to note that the high school I went to was a more academically intense school where almost all of my classes were honors classes. The first week of high school my dad grounded me for a stupid reason and took my phone. So I decided to restrict my eating. I basically had under 100 calories a day for an entire week and also did not speak to him for the entire time that he took away my phone. I have always been smart and found ways around punishments such as punishing my parents (not talking to them/ignoring them) and lots of reading (which let me go on other types of adventure without having to leave my bed). Then I had hospitalization number one where I spent 3 days in a psych hospital. Sophomore year happened and I had 2 more psych hospitalizations. Then Junior year happened. That was when I started purging. I was stressed (from school) and nothing seemed to be working out and I felt so ignored by my parents. So the 2 fainting spells happened before the psych hospitalization Junior year and were part of the reason for my hospitalization. It was (and still is) really hard for me to verbalize how I am feeling so all I knew was I hated myself and everything regarding living. I was really depressed and anxious (to the point of daily panic attacks) and it was a terrible feeling and I just wanted it to end. I am very thankful for the amazing therapist I had at the time because after that hospitalization she decided to up my therapy from once a week to twice a week. We talked about my eating at every session, how many calories I had eaten that day/what I had eaten, what was my caloric intake goal every day, how many calories I was burning from exercise, etc. and the really wonderful thing that my therapist at the time did, was that she didn’t push me to eat more or try to shove the food is fuel speech down my throat. She just listened, took notes, and nodded. Sometimes she would ask (especially on a day where I had only had around 200-400 calories) how much water I had and/or how I was feeling that day. We did that for one or two months and then went back to once a week when I came home from Washington D.C. We also decided that after the semester was over that I would transfer to another school that would be less stressful for me. It was hard to leave but I still have amazing friends that I still talk with and hang out with. Then that therapist took a promotion so she couldn’t be my therapist anymore so I switched off to another therapist who I saw 7 times total before she also to the same promotion and then switched me off to her cousin who is now my current therapist.
I somehow made it through the rest of junior year and all of senior year without anything super major happening with my eating until now.
From having cancer and doing chemo it changed my appetite to the point of me not really being hungry. But I did eat during treatment when I was feeling up to it and not nauseous. Near the end of my treatment my one of the physician assistants told me that my weight was down. They didn’t think much of it and just told me to make sure I was eating as well as I could. For the weeks following the end of my treatment my appetite didn’t return and I still was feeling crappy. But I saw my weight dropping. I had lost 10 pounds over about 2 weeks. That made me really happy. So when my appetite did come back I still restricted. Yesterday I weighed myself and saw that I have lost about 20 pounds in the past month. It made me happy to see the number on the scale going down instead of going up or staying the same. Then I ate dinner, and felt so disgusting because it wasn’t a healthy meal so I purged. This was the 3rd time I had purged this year. I don’t purge often because I sing and it can damage the vocal chords and because I personally don’t like the feeling of vomiting. I only did it because I felt that I had to. I knew that if I didn’t the disgusting feeling I had would just linger.
A lot of people don’t understand eating disorders. There are treatment options for Eating Disorders but there is no cure. People will ask me “why do you keep doing this when you know it can/will harm your body?” or they say “you’re smart why are you doing this?” There really isn’t an answer to why I keep doing this other than I have an illness and it’s what I know how to do when it comes to coping. When people tell me that I am smart but what I am doing is stupid is really frustrating. My intelligence has noting to do with my reasoning skills when I am in the heat of the moment or crying over my bowl of 265 calories worth of cereal with milk knowing that I will probably go and purge, take a laxative, and/or feel the need to burn off all of the calories and then some doing cardio. Every time I eat I am anxious. Eating with family and friends is hard because I feel like they are judging me for how much or how little I am eating and/or how fast or slow I am eating. Then me trying to drink lots of water so that I won’t be lying when I use the excuse of not being very hungry or not feeling well.
I told 2 of my friends about my purge because I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t tell my therapist that I purged when I saw her, but she knows that my eating has been crap and that it’s not due to a post-chemo side effect. Since we worked on my trauma narrative, we did not go into depth talking about my eating this week because it was the end of my session and we finally got to a point where I wasn’t overly anxious and since I haven’t fainted we didn’t discuss it more. Next week we probably will but on the bright side next week is our last session for 2 weeks because of Christmas and she will be gone for one week and then the second week we didn’t schedule because she decided a break would be good (this was 2 weeks ago when she made that determination). She is aware that I will only reach out to her between sessions if it has to do with me not feeling safe/needing to be talked off a ledge or just to vent. Other than that my eating/lack there of is not talked about with her outside of my sessions.
Eating Disorders are really really REALLY shitty and hard to deal with especially when people look at it as a choice or a fad diet. Everyone has a different reason for onset and a different severity of the disease. For me it never really goes away I learn new ways to deal with it and I can make it through a few months and then what I was doing stops working and I have to find something new to try. Most importantly I have to want to try something different. Right now I don’t want do anything about my eating except continue to restrict and start doing daily cardio and stretching again. Yes I am completely aware of what I am doing yet I also don’t feel like I have a choice. I don’t plan on doing anymore purging but if it happens it happens. I don’t plan on voluntarily talking about my eating with my therapist unless she asks about it. I currently do not see my eating as problematic. That may change in a few days, months, years, or never, I don’t even know.
So today I was able to participate in my very first voting experience, and to be honest, I really hated it and I understand why people chose not to vote. The amount of hatred people are receiving for voting for any of the candidates is unbelievable. There are reasons to dislike each of the candidates but for people to use racial slurs at polling locations, destroying property in the name sake of a certain candidate, or simply refusing to listen to a person’s reasoning and telling them they are wrong (after asking why they want that candidate in office), is not okay.
I was lucky enough to go to a school where diversity is what connected all of us. I spent 2 and a half years of high school with people who were Muslims, Christians, Jews, Atheists, Agnostics, and so many more. My friends that are Muslims were consistently worried about their families that were in the middle east. I also know that many of my friends who wore hijabs were labeled as terrorists and/or told to come back from where they came from, when they are U.S. citizens.
At first I didn’t understand why anyone would want to vote for Trump or Hillary, but if going to a multi-cultural school taught me one thing, is that being open minded is necessary in all aspects of life.
So I took a step back to examine why someone would vote for either of the two candidate options (I didn’t look into third party candidates because they really don’t have a chance at winning). Both had negative and positive aspects and I understand why people would vote for either.
Let’s keep in mind that people are imperfect and we can’t look over one candidates imperfections to point out the others. Both candidates suck in their own way, but one of them is going to be running our country so we are going to need to get over it. Both have done illegal things and both have done things that are out right wrong, but move on and give them a chance.
Also, please remember to come together and be nice to people. I don’t care what your reasoning is to be hateful towards someone else, suck it up and keep your mouth shut. If it does not serve any good don’t say it and walk away. Spread some good no matter the outcome of this election. Hate is just going to move our country backwards.
For the past 10 years physical pain has been a part of daily life for me. *I will use the rating scale of 0-no pain at all to 10-I am crying on the bathroom floor because of the pain* Usually it is manageable, 3 or 4, or is at an 8 but resolves itself within a hour or two or after sleeping/resting. It’s a normal thing for me to have Icy Hot or Salonpas patches all over my body, having my mom rub essential oils into my skin, being in braces to stabilize the joint that is currently causing pain, or having KT tape all over my body. But it’s not normal for me to really ever complain about the pain or be concerned that there is a problem that may warrant a trip to Urgent Care or Emergency. As I am writing this I am currently sitting with pain pushing a 9. I probably should go to Emergency, I probably should’ve gone to Emergency right after I noticed bruising and swelling with the pain yesterday night, but I didn’t and haven’t yet because there was no injury. The times that I have gone to Emergency for pain not caused by an injury, the doctors are confused and if they know I have a history of depression, they will tell me that I need to talk to my therapist because it’s just in my head. Last night after I noticed the bruising I had my mom come look and I asked her if she saw it to. Both of my parents know that when I am in a lot of pain I get very irritable and I’m not a pleasant person to be around, and that was me last night. Today I’m not as irritable but I am still in the same amount of pain accompanied with difficultly walking. I only slept for about 4 hours because of the pain and I have taken Naproxen and Tylenol but nothing seems to help and I have narcotics for if my pain is really bad but all those do is put me to sleep or make me sick so I haven’t gone down that road yet.
I think I probably should go to Emergency, but I don’t think that my parents think it’s that serious and I’m afraid that if I go to Emergency they are not going to believe that I am in pain. So now I am just going to wait and hope that it doesn’t get worse.
When you are told you have an illness you thought you’d never get, what are you supposed to do? I laughed at it and said “of course that would happen to me.” Then I met with a specialist. Tests, tests, and more tests. PET scan, MUGA scan and, CT scan. Blood draws. I can’t work at my job, the risk of infection is too high; okay that’s fine. Stay away from sources of high infection aka children; okay that’s fine. University this year? No, not an option; the tears start to fall. All I’ve wanted to do the entire time I was in High School was to do my best so I could go to University. Call the school and talk to them about deferring. They tell me I am going to lose all of my scholarships and grants provided by the University but I can try to appeal it next year when I can attend and hope the will give them to me. Crying because there’s nothing I can do anymore. I DON’T CARE I’M GOING TO LOSE MY HAIR, I DON’T CARE THAT I MIGHT NOT BE ABLE TO HAVE CHILDREN OF MY OWN, I DON’T CARE THAT I AM GOING TO FEEL LIKE CRAP. ALL I WANTED WAS TO GO TO UNIVERSITY.
I have so many amazing friends that have told me they’ll bring me starbucks or they’ll come over to just hang out with me. One told me that we will make matching flower crowns and headbands. My therapist is willing to come to me to do my sessions if I am not feeling up to coming into her office.
There’s no right way to tell people you have cancer and there’s no right way to be told you have cancer either. There are some that I don’t think would understand that I’m not going to die and that the cancer I have 90-100 percent remission rate. There are others that will just feel bad for me and I don’t want that (I hate when people pity me). Then there are others that will just not know what to do and be speechless.
I have Nodular Lymphocyte Predominant Hodgkin’s Lymphoma stage 2B. I start Chemotherapy in a week.
I have had no choice but to try to process all of this but I can’t every time I talk about it I make a joke or change the subject because that’s the only way I can cope with it. I don’t know what to feel except everything all at once in waves. I pretend to be strong and okay because that’s what I do.
This why I haven’t posted in a while. I’ve been to overwhelmed with this shitty illness that has basically put my life on hold for the next 3-9 months (possibly more).
Wow, what can I say about the coolest person at church (other than Jesus). The boi has swag yo. He got dem dank memes.
(This is what happens when you ask for help on a Blog post at church).
Last weekend I didn’t post anything in observance of Easter (I probably should have said that I wouldn’t be posting earlier but better late then never).
Next I got a job like a month ago but I just started working this week. I went from Lifeguard to not working to babysitting two adorable kids to retail. YIKES.
Due to my struggles with eating (which have gotten worse since I last posted) now my therapist wants to talk about my eating…every week…
Lastly I’m am officially on SPRING BREAK!!!!!!!!! But I will post at least once and hopefully work on some other posts that will be published in weeks to come!
If there are any topics that you would like me to write about please let me know. You can comment it or you can send me a message through Facebook.
Depression: I would say that I am at about a 5 to a 6.
ED: I don’t even know if I can rate this on a scale. Basically I want to starve myself or purge but part of me doesn’t want to. I literally have been struggling every day on whether or not I should eat or if I do eat should I purge?
That Girl With Depresssion 
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