Kate stayed in the hospital for the next 3 weeks and was eventually diagnosed with a psychotic disorder. I saw her parents frequently when they came into town to visit her and spoke with her on occasion when she would call to yell at me for ruining her life. I returned her cats to her ex-boyfriend and attempted to regain some normalcy in my life. My apartment still smelled of the perfume that Kate anointed me with when she thought I was dying no matter what kind of cleaners, deoodorizers, and scented candles I used to cover it up. And, regardless of how much chocolate I ate, bad television I watched, or hours that I spent overtime at work, I couldn't make it go away...I couldn't forget that I finally spoke out loud about my sexual abuse, that I saw somebody lose hold of themselves possibly forever, and that my depression was becoming so intense it was affecting my ability to function. I decided to ask another work colleague if she could recommend a counselor as her family was good friends with a local psychotherapist and I thought she wouldn't judge me too harshly for seeking that kind of help. I told her that the stress of my health issues over the past year and the episode with Kate were catching up with me. The next day she gave me a referral to a private practice just a few miles from work. It took me a year to realize that this practice specialized in trauma recovery and sexual abuse.
I was skeptical, though not resistant, to the whole therapy thing. It is a strange paradigm to enter into and I wasn't exactly sure how it was supposed to work. I spent the next several months discussing the episode with Kate and beginning to string together a narrative about being sexually molested by a neighbor, the son of my mom's best friend, who also happened to be my same age. I wasn't calling it sexual abuse at the time, but my therapist was helping me to get there. The more we talked, the more I shared, the more I realized that I had been abused and living a life half-awake...subverting my sexuality, dissociated for most of the time, emotionally numbing with food, and having extreme difficulty managing intimacy with family and friends. I began to understand that I wasn't just some sexually perverse person filled with secrecy and shame over being sexualized so early and often in my life. I realized that I was never a willing participant in any of it and there was an explanation for so many of my experiences, my lapses in memory, my tendency to be revictimized, and relationship to myself and others, that all related to these events. I was a sexual abuse survivor. Holy shit, I am a sexual abuse survivor. I began being flooded with memories of the abuse. I became extremely emotional and moody as I embraced the reality of my history. One day it might feel liberating to have an explanation for so many things, the next horribly overwhelming and inescapable that I was nothing more than a traumatized person stumbling through life as an amalgamation of defenses. I began to feel not so different from Kate and afraid that I might be more emotionally unstable than I ever recognized.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Friday, July 8, 2011
Going a little bit insane
Have you ever witnessed someone lose their mind, or better yet, themselves? I have. And, contrary to what you might think, it's not as straightforward or as easy to remain calm through than one might imagine. My co-worker, and sometimes friend, Kate, called me one night distraught after breaking up with her long-term boyfriend and searching for somewhere close by to stay for awhile to recover and figure out her next move. Sure, I could participate in the cause and provide this grieving person with a place to seek safety and mend a broken heart...what else did I have to do? That night began a 4-day excursion into a firsthand experience of a psychotic break. Thankfully, only partially my own.
Within 24 hours, Kate had attempted to leave one of those one-hour optometrist mega-stores glasses in hand and tab unpaid because "Money is meaningless. God will take care of us now". She also tried to leave a Mexican restaurant in the same fashion, but with less allusion to God's ability to pay for our purchase. This post-break-up recovery was beginning to cost me a lot of money and making Kate act rather strange. 24 hours after that Kate had not slept a wink in 3 days, had ransacked my apartment, was prosthelitizing any chance she got, and began talking about how her father sexually abused her when she was a little girl (she later retracted these allegations). My increasing concern about Kate's state of mind, my growing sleep deprivation, and her conversation about sexual abuse triggered feelings and awakened memories that I had long attempted to suppress even as I always had access to them. For the first time in my life I said out loud that the first time someone had sex with me I was six years old. Great timing, I know, but one cannot predict nor control spontaneous declarations of sexual abuse.
The next 24 hours are emblazoned in my brain like a slow-motion movie, frame by frame. Kate continued her downward spiral as I attempted to talk her into going to the hospital a mere four blocks from my house "just to make sure everything was alright". The more she realized that I was becoming scared and steering her towards help she became erradic and was threatening to drive herself in her car out of state "on the wings of God". I had to do something bold to protect her and myself. Don't ask me how I made this decision, out of all other options, but I ended up faking my own death. I get points for creativity at least, right? Perhaps I was merely acting out how I felt. I told her I felt like I was having a heart attack, made believable by her awareness of my previous cardiac condition, and knew that I was dying. I collapsed on my floor as Kate began chanting and strangely made the choice to empty the entire contents of my Issey Miyake cologne all over my body to "bless" me. That is literally the last time I spent that much money on cologne. She was so far gone at that point that she let me walk downstairs with her, in my dead state, and drive her car to the ER entrance of the hospital. She ran screaming into the hospital that I was dying while I was attempting to whisper to the doctors out of one side of my mouth that my friend was going crazy. Now the frames of the movie become jagged and out of time...Kate begins screaming and is tied down in restraints on a gurney...someone is asking me about her insurance, her closest relatives, and the events of the past 4 days...Kate begins screaming obscenities at me as I begin to uncontrollably cry for what would turn out to be the next 2 days...I'm waking Kate's parents up at 3am, people I've never met, to tell them that I've taken their daughter to an ER nearly 50 miles away from them because she is losing her mind...I'm driving back to my apartment, barely able to see the road, after I realize that her 2 cats have been in her car the entire time as Kate had planned to take them on her road trip...I collapse in Kate's car, unable to move, and watch the sunrise with two screaming cats in carriers unsure of what to do next...I hear a song on the radio which somehow perfectly captures my confusion, fear, and the unspeakable sadness of watching Kate lose herself and speaking my own crazy history in an unscripted moment of exhaustion and emotion, a song that will flood me with unbearable emotions for years to come...I'm in my apartment cleaning up my expensive perfume so that the cats don't eat it up off the floor...I am naked on my red IKEA couch trembling...I am back at the hospital crying to a psychiatric nurse who tells me that Kate has been stripping her clothes off all night and has yelled at her terrified parents who drove in the middle of the night to find their daughter a shadow of herself...I am hugging this nurse who is gracious enough to whisper to me "you did the right thing, sweetie, this isn't your fault." Thank you, dear, unnamed psychiatric nurse, for saying the words that I clung to for dear life over the next several weeks. It was not my fault. I did the right thing.
Within 24 hours, Kate had attempted to leave one of those one-hour optometrist mega-stores glasses in hand and tab unpaid because "Money is meaningless. God will take care of us now". She also tried to leave a Mexican restaurant in the same fashion, but with less allusion to God's ability to pay for our purchase. This post-break-up recovery was beginning to cost me a lot of money and making Kate act rather strange. 24 hours after that Kate had not slept a wink in 3 days, had ransacked my apartment, was prosthelitizing any chance she got, and began talking about how her father sexually abused her when she was a little girl (she later retracted these allegations). My increasing concern about Kate's state of mind, my growing sleep deprivation, and her conversation about sexual abuse triggered feelings and awakened memories that I had long attempted to suppress even as I always had access to them. For the first time in my life I said out loud that the first time someone had sex with me I was six years old. Great timing, I know, but one cannot predict nor control spontaneous declarations of sexual abuse.
The next 24 hours are emblazoned in my brain like a slow-motion movie, frame by frame. Kate continued her downward spiral as I attempted to talk her into going to the hospital a mere four blocks from my house "just to make sure everything was alright". The more she realized that I was becoming scared and steering her towards help she became erradic and was threatening to drive herself in her car out of state "on the wings of God". I had to do something bold to protect her and myself. Don't ask me how I made this decision, out of all other options, but I ended up faking my own death. I get points for creativity at least, right? Perhaps I was merely acting out how I felt. I told her I felt like I was having a heart attack, made believable by her awareness of my previous cardiac condition, and knew that I was dying. I collapsed on my floor as Kate began chanting and strangely made the choice to empty the entire contents of my Issey Miyake cologne all over my body to "bless" me. That is literally the last time I spent that much money on cologne. She was so far gone at that point that she let me walk downstairs with her, in my dead state, and drive her car to the ER entrance of the hospital. She ran screaming into the hospital that I was dying while I was attempting to whisper to the doctors out of one side of my mouth that my friend was going crazy. Now the frames of the movie become jagged and out of time...Kate begins screaming and is tied down in restraints on a gurney...someone is asking me about her insurance, her closest relatives, and the events of the past 4 days...Kate begins screaming obscenities at me as I begin to uncontrollably cry for what would turn out to be the next 2 days...I'm waking Kate's parents up at 3am, people I've never met, to tell them that I've taken their daughter to an ER nearly 50 miles away from them because she is losing her mind...I'm driving back to my apartment, barely able to see the road, after I realize that her 2 cats have been in her car the entire time as Kate had planned to take them on her road trip...I collapse in Kate's car, unable to move, and watch the sunrise with two screaming cats in carriers unsure of what to do next...I hear a song on the radio which somehow perfectly captures my confusion, fear, and the unspeakable sadness of watching Kate lose herself and speaking my own crazy history in an unscripted moment of exhaustion and emotion, a song that will flood me with unbearable emotions for years to come...I'm in my apartment cleaning up my expensive perfume so that the cats don't eat it up off the floor...I am naked on my red IKEA couch trembling...I am back at the hospital crying to a psychiatric nurse who tells me that Kate has been stripping her clothes off all night and has yelled at her terrified parents who drove in the middle of the night to find their daughter a shadow of herself...I am hugging this nurse who is gracious enough to whisper to me "you did the right thing, sweetie, this isn't your fault." Thank you, dear, unnamed psychiatric nurse, for saying the words that I clung to for dear life over the next several weeks. It was not my fault. I did the right thing.
I'm a bit murky here
This should bring me up to approximately the summer of 1998. I wish I could remember that spring and summer with the clarity that I recall so much of my early Oprah experiences but I was in a highly dissociative state as I embraced my weight loss failure and my life became, once again, lonely and hopeless. My fantastic roommate who nursed me through my physical and emotional breakdown moved out and away to Los Angeles, a plan we once intended to complete together before I spent any and all of my savings on medical bills. I moved into my own apartment in a north shore suburb and attempted to settle back into my half-abusive, most certainly boring job and feel grateful that I had come through a pretty serious health scare mostly unscathed. I had managed to lose my dear friend from college over the past year as my grandiosity about my supposed transformation into my athletic and skinny self and then torturous decline into depression and chronic pain pushed her away and into her own successful weight loss and life transforming journey...without me. I know now that I deserved that and likely more. I felt abandoned and punished for even attempting to flip the script on my fat self. I had a new mission to find some new friends to populate to desolate landscape of my life and was on overdrive with binge eating. I found solace in a motley crew of work peers who were just as eager, for their own reasons, to be distracted from their lives and didn't really mind so much sharing a high calorie meal out from time to time.
Where my memory does come back into sharp focus is the spring of 1999. See, I really have glossed over a fairly decent chunk of a year there. I'm not certain I'd really like any of it back but it remains disconcerting to have no access to rather large chunks of one life. But the spring of 1999 is crystal clear. The spring of 1999 is when Kate went crazy in my one-bedroom apartment by the lake and effectively cracked open a small tear in my universe that would soon become a gaping hole.
Where my memory does come back into sharp focus is the spring of 1999. See, I really have glossed over a fairly decent chunk of a year there. I'm not certain I'd really like any of it back but it remains disconcerting to have no access to rather large chunks of one life. But the spring of 1999 is crystal clear. The spring of 1999 is when Kate went crazy in my one-bedroom apartment by the lake and effectively cracked open a small tear in my universe that would soon become a gaping hole.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Recovery with a side of doughnuts
Three days in the hospital and one three hour surgery later I was able to walk myself to the same car that brought me writhing in pain to the ER and go home. It was an amazing relief to not be incapacitated with pain and to experience walking again, even though I had very little balance, confidence, or speed when shuffling around in my apartment. Once I withdrew from the opiates that I had been taking daily for several months and actually believed that the worst of this injury might actually be over I found my purpose: I was going to put every bit of my energy into my recovery. I would resurrect and recreate myself into an even better version of my Oprah-self. It was an amazing sense of direction and I was soon walking laps around my dining room table, taking the three flights of steps to my apartment with ease and walking several blocks around my neighborhood. Yet, something was terribly wrong. I was having a lot of chest pain, still experiencing waves of anxiety, and my new walking goal was to make it the four blocks to the Dunkin' Donuts to buy a dozen doughnuts to reward myself when I got home. That little string that I had grabbed onto after my surgery to bring me towards "healing" was fraying at a rapid rate. I soon returned to work and was blazing through my physical therapy appointments. I wanted to feel well and be able to look back on this chapter of my life as just another challenge that I moved through to become a better person. Except, something was terribly wrong.
My orthopedic surgeon decided that my complaints of daily, frequent chest pain were worth a referral to a cardiologist. I soon was told that I had an enlarged heart and fluid around my heart, a condition known as pericarditis, that were causing my discomfort. The cause of these conditions could not quite be determined but four months of oral steriods and a year of pushing my body beyond its limits were likely involved. My resting heart rate was nearly 100 and I often felt short of breath. This too was blamed on my newly diagnosed cardiac conditions but no one ever intimated it could also be a result of anxiety. I wouldn't figure that out for a few more years. I wore heart monitors, had multiple stress tests, and was but on beta blockers in an effort to offer relief and an explanation. I can tell you that this was the chink in my armor that weakened by already threatened defense against depression. I was 28 years old, unable to bend over and tie my shoes, and spending my free time in the waiting room of a cardiologist's office where my cohort were mostly over the age of 75 and lugging oxygen tanks behind them. Who the hell was I and how exactly did I get where I was?
I pushed on, regaining my strength and tolerating a full day of work within weeks. My newfound heart condition had freaked me out enough that I was terrified to walk briskly let alone attempt to return to any kind of workout schedule. You know the formula: dozens of doughnuts, sedentary lifestyle, depression and anxiety = weight gain. At first the weight returned ratherly slowly. I was actually quite pleased initially as my frequent binging did not seem to translate to the quick weight gain that I was used to in my past. I gained approximately 25 lbs. in the next 12 months, nearly halfway back to my pre-Oprah weight. By that point I had stopped my cardiac medicine and my enlarged heart had decreased in size to a somewhat acceptable range. My back pain had diminished to mostly a nagging discomfort whenever I sat or laid in one position for too long, and, for the most part, my life had returned to a new normal. I continued to binge and to gain weight for the next several months as I was settling into the realization that my weight loss and Oprah year were just another epic fail in my life.
My orthopedic surgeon decided that my complaints of daily, frequent chest pain were worth a referral to a cardiologist. I soon was told that I had an enlarged heart and fluid around my heart, a condition known as pericarditis, that were causing my discomfort. The cause of these conditions could not quite be determined but four months of oral steriods and a year of pushing my body beyond its limits were likely involved. My resting heart rate was nearly 100 and I often felt short of breath. This too was blamed on my newly diagnosed cardiac conditions but no one ever intimated it could also be a result of anxiety. I wouldn't figure that out for a few more years. I wore heart monitors, had multiple stress tests, and was but on beta blockers in an effort to offer relief and an explanation. I can tell you that this was the chink in my armor that weakened by already threatened defense against depression. I was 28 years old, unable to bend over and tie my shoes, and spending my free time in the waiting room of a cardiologist's office where my cohort were mostly over the age of 75 and lugging oxygen tanks behind them. Who the hell was I and how exactly did I get where I was?
I pushed on, regaining my strength and tolerating a full day of work within weeks. My newfound heart condition had freaked me out enough that I was terrified to walk briskly let alone attempt to return to any kind of workout schedule. You know the formula: dozens of doughnuts, sedentary lifestyle, depression and anxiety = weight gain. At first the weight returned ratherly slowly. I was actually quite pleased initially as my frequent binging did not seem to translate to the quick weight gain that I was used to in my past. I gained approximately 25 lbs. in the next 12 months, nearly halfway back to my pre-Oprah weight. By that point I had stopped my cardiac medicine and my enlarged heart had decreased in size to a somewhat acceptable range. My back pain had diminished to mostly a nagging discomfort whenever I sat or laid in one position for too long, and, for the most part, my life had returned to a new normal. I continued to binge and to gain weight for the next several months as I was settling into the realization that my weight loss and Oprah year were just another epic fail in my life.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Desperate Avoidance
I was entering into a wellspring of panic in which I was willing to endure months of immobilization and excruciating pain in order to desperately hold onto the smallest shred of hope that I could continue to brutalize my body in the ways I'd been doing now for over a year. If I lost the ability to push myself in those ways I surely would return to my formerly fat self. I did not want to be that person at all costs. I took a short-term medical leave of absence from my job and met with several neurologists, sports medicine providers, orthopedic surgeons, physical therpists and rehab specialists,and general practitioners to manage my pain and attempt to decrease the herniation in my discs. I had multiple injections of cortisone, suffered through hours of physical therapy, and took oral steriods and narcotics for nearly 4 months in a row and was still barely able to walk from my futon to the bathroom in my apartment, let alone wipe myself after going to the bathroom.
Emotionally I was becoming as numb as my right leg. There are two occasions that I recall connecting to my overwhelming fear and sadness. One of them was the day when I ended up watching an Oprah rerun of my last appearance on the show as I was bedridden and stuck in the drug haze of my painkillers. I do not have words to describe the sublimely sick irony of watching oneself on TV celebrate a "spiritual awakening" about finally conquering your weight loss issues as pictures of the moments that your life would change forever flicker on the screen and you sit at home barely 6 months later unable to move because of that very "spiritual awakening". Needless to say, I was overcome with grief, loss, and anger and a whole host of complicated emotions watching myself revel in the false persona of my newly thin and revitalized self. The other time that I was overcome with panic and fear was a legitimate anxiety attack that I had one afternoon while steeped in pain and the realization that as time went on my odds of avoiding surgery were dramatically slimming. I was fortunate enough to be living with a roommate who had been a co-worker with me at a summer camp for children and adults with cerebral palsy and had become a dear friend. She was perhaps the only thing making my convalescence at home even possible as she prepared and served my meals, helped me shower and go to the bathroom, and most importantly, was a faithful companion in my darkest times. Thankfully she was with me on the afternoon of my panic attack and agreed to sit with me and hold me while a sobbed, trembled, and thought I was going to die. I'm not sure if I thought I was going to die or wanted to die on that day. Either way I was convinced my life was ending. Of course, it was...my life as I knew it was about to change forever.
A few weeks later my avoidance was to come to a screeching halt as my body made my decision about how to proceed without my consent. My parents had come into town to take me to a surgical consult as I was finally beginning to explore the reality that I may have no other means of recovery. While getting into the car to go to that appointment I twisted my back in just the right way getting into the back seat that my L-5 spinal disc finally ruptured and I was sent into the most excruciating waves of pain and nausea that I have ever felt. That was one wild car ride to downtown Chicago as I attempted to provide navigation directions to my father as he fearfully dodged the traffic and I cried out directions from the floor wells of the back seat where my head had fallen. We made it to the ER where a compassionate security guard lifted me out of the backseat and into the hospital, as none of the ER staff would help me get there. I'm not certain if you've ever spent any time at an inner city urban emergency room or not but I can assure you that my back pain was not the highest priority for the medical staff. As I lay writhing and crying in pain my mother did her best Terms of Endearment impression while screaming at the nurses to tend to me. Trust me when I say that my mother's tactic did not actually endear any of them to me and quite possibly had the opposite effect. However, I was able to clearly and calmy tell a nurse of the source of my pain and the fact that I had just been on my way to a surgical consult with a doctor at the hospital. Morphine was administered. I was admitted. This was not my plan. I was going to have emergency back surgery whether I liked it or not.
Emotionally I was becoming as numb as my right leg. There are two occasions that I recall connecting to my overwhelming fear and sadness. One of them was the day when I ended up watching an Oprah rerun of my last appearance on the show as I was bedridden and stuck in the drug haze of my painkillers. I do not have words to describe the sublimely sick irony of watching oneself on TV celebrate a "spiritual awakening" about finally conquering your weight loss issues as pictures of the moments that your life would change forever flicker on the screen and you sit at home barely 6 months later unable to move because of that very "spiritual awakening". Needless to say, I was overcome with grief, loss, and anger and a whole host of complicated emotions watching myself revel in the false persona of my newly thin and revitalized self. The other time that I was overcome with panic and fear was a legitimate anxiety attack that I had one afternoon while steeped in pain and the realization that as time went on my odds of avoiding surgery were dramatically slimming. I was fortunate enough to be living with a roommate who had been a co-worker with me at a summer camp for children and adults with cerebral palsy and had become a dear friend. She was perhaps the only thing making my convalescence at home even possible as she prepared and served my meals, helped me shower and go to the bathroom, and most importantly, was a faithful companion in my darkest times. Thankfully she was with me on the afternoon of my panic attack and agreed to sit with me and hold me while a sobbed, trembled, and thought I was going to die. I'm not sure if I thought I was going to die or wanted to die on that day. Either way I was convinced my life was ending. Of course, it was...my life as I knew it was about to change forever.
A few weeks later my avoidance was to come to a screeching halt as my body made my decision about how to proceed without my consent. My parents had come into town to take me to a surgical consult as I was finally beginning to explore the reality that I may have no other means of recovery. While getting into the car to go to that appointment I twisted my back in just the right way getting into the back seat that my L-5 spinal disc finally ruptured and I was sent into the most excruciating waves of pain and nausea that I have ever felt. That was one wild car ride to downtown Chicago as I attempted to provide navigation directions to my father as he fearfully dodged the traffic and I cried out directions from the floor wells of the back seat where my head had fallen. We made it to the ER where a compassionate security guard lifted me out of the backseat and into the hospital, as none of the ER staff would help me get there. I'm not certain if you've ever spent any time at an inner city urban emergency room or not but I can assure you that my back pain was not the highest priority for the medical staff. As I lay writhing and crying in pain my mother did her best Terms of Endearment impression while screaming at the nurses to tend to me. Trust me when I say that my mother's tactic did not actually endear any of them to me and quite possibly had the opposite effect. However, I was able to clearly and calmy tell a nurse of the source of my pain and the fact that I had just been on my way to a surgical consult with a doctor at the hospital. Morphine was administered. I was admitted. This was not my plan. I was going to have emergency back surgery whether I liked it or not.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
It all falls down
I needed more and more creative motivation to push through my growing pain and depression and continue my grueling workout schedule. I devised an "adventure vacation" to Colorado with the intention of doing all of the adventurous physical activities and challenges that my weight purportedly had keep me from doing in my life. I was successful at asking a loyal, if not weary, friend to join me on this trip to the Rocky Mountains and she even agreed to my outrageous schedule of switchback mountain biking, horseback trail riding, white water rafting, and hiking. Even as I planned for this trip, and all of the glory that I hoped it would bring, I continued to increasingly binge on fatty, sugar-filled foods and push my body to new limits to punish myself for such disgusting gluttony and self-sabotage. I have such sadness now as I look back at how unaware, confused, sad, and angry I was at a time when I was desperate to have the world see me as a successful young person reaching to grab my thin-girl destiny.
The vacation came in the summer of 1997, nearly a year after my Oprah debut. It was indeed a mostly beautiful, fun, activity filled trip which my friend dutifully survived, and quite possibly enjoyed. It wasn't until the last few days of the trip that my destiny came crashing into focus, even if it wasn't visible at the time. There was nothing particularly special about the day or our decision to spontaneously enter a recreational indoor rock climbing facility to add to our growing list of conquered adventures. I recall climbing to the top of the wall with a fair amount of ease and feeling quite confident about my unforeseen skills at scaling. It wasn't until the young man at the other end of the rope holding me up let go of that rope as I was repelling back down the wall and sent me crashing nearly 20 feet to the ground on my back that the experience took a turn. It all happened very fast and my memories of that day have become a flashback of moments in time. I checked all of my extremities and made a quick scan to see if I was bleeding once I was splayed out on the ground and everyone in the facility came rushing to see if I was okay. I determined that I was perfectly fine as I could move unencumbered, there was no sign of blood or brusing, and I wasn't experiencing any acute pain. I even went white water rafting later that afternoon, and horesback riding the next day and was attempting to laugh off the experience as a minor bump in the road in an otherwise amazing, life-changing trip. Funny what we can push through with sheer determination and a keen ability to ignore our bodies.
As luck would have it, I got yet another call from an Oprah producer about a month after my adventure vacation. You guessed it...I agreed to once again be on the show to share my increasing success at trimming my waistline and my "spiritual awakening" about my relationship with my body. More Oprah hugs (I fantasized that we were becoming friends by this point), lots of high-fives, and even a photo montage of from my adventure vacation rounded out my latest, and what would be my last, television spotlight. I particularly recall the photos of myself at the top of the rock climbing wall. I didn't mention my fall and somehow completely forgot to share that I'd become dangerously depressed and was now binging on a weekly basis. I honestly think that I was able to buy the hype that I was an inspiration to myself and now for the dozens of other overweight people following my progress and working towards their own personal renovation.
A few weeks later, I collapsed on a step machine at the gym and could barely get myself to my car and drive home...my right leg and foot felt totally numb and wouldn't bear my weight. I had no idea what the problem could be and initially thought I had pulled a muscle. That same day I went to see a doctor who told me that I was having back spasms and prescribed a muscle relaxer. I scheduled an appointment with a chiropractor, because that's what you do when you have back pain. After a couple of days of chiropractric treatments, and more trips to doctors and a neurologist my MRI revealed two extremely herniated discs in my low back. Four months of extreme pain and a series of medical procedures and medications to avoid back surgery began. Once a doctor told me that back surgery would take away my ability to run or bike for any sizeable distance I was determined to do whatever I could to not let that happen. My overexercising was the only thing keeping me from ballooning up to my former size and I could not live with that humiliation.
The vacation came in the summer of 1997, nearly a year after my Oprah debut. It was indeed a mostly beautiful, fun, activity filled trip which my friend dutifully survived, and quite possibly enjoyed. It wasn't until the last few days of the trip that my destiny came crashing into focus, even if it wasn't visible at the time. There was nothing particularly special about the day or our decision to spontaneously enter a recreational indoor rock climbing facility to add to our growing list of conquered adventures. I recall climbing to the top of the wall with a fair amount of ease and feeling quite confident about my unforeseen skills at scaling. It wasn't until the young man at the other end of the rope holding me up let go of that rope as I was repelling back down the wall and sent me crashing nearly 20 feet to the ground on my back that the experience took a turn. It all happened very fast and my memories of that day have become a flashback of moments in time. I checked all of my extremities and made a quick scan to see if I was bleeding once I was splayed out on the ground and everyone in the facility came rushing to see if I was okay. I determined that I was perfectly fine as I could move unencumbered, there was no sign of blood or brusing, and I wasn't experiencing any acute pain. I even went white water rafting later that afternoon, and horesback riding the next day and was attempting to laugh off the experience as a minor bump in the road in an otherwise amazing, life-changing trip. Funny what we can push through with sheer determination and a keen ability to ignore our bodies.
As luck would have it, I got yet another call from an Oprah producer about a month after my adventure vacation. You guessed it...I agreed to once again be on the show to share my increasing success at trimming my waistline and my "spiritual awakening" about my relationship with my body. More Oprah hugs (I fantasized that we were becoming friends by this point), lots of high-fives, and even a photo montage of from my adventure vacation rounded out my latest, and what would be my last, television spotlight. I particularly recall the photos of myself at the top of the rock climbing wall. I didn't mention my fall and somehow completely forgot to share that I'd become dangerously depressed and was now binging on a weekly basis. I honestly think that I was able to buy the hype that I was an inspiration to myself and now for the dozens of other overweight people following my progress and working towards their own personal renovation.
A few weeks later, I collapsed on a step machine at the gym and could barely get myself to my car and drive home...my right leg and foot felt totally numb and wouldn't bear my weight. I had no idea what the problem could be and initially thought I had pulled a muscle. That same day I went to see a doctor who told me that I was having back spasms and prescribed a muscle relaxer. I scheduled an appointment with a chiropractor, because that's what you do when you have back pain. After a couple of days of chiropractric treatments, and more trips to doctors and a neurologist my MRI revealed two extremely herniated discs in my low back. Four months of extreme pain and a series of medical procedures and medications to avoid back surgery began. Once a doctor told me that back surgery would take away my ability to run or bike for any sizeable distance I was determined to do whatever I could to not let that happen. My overexercising was the only thing keeping me from ballooning up to my former size and I could not live with that humiliation.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Let's try this again
I'd received the call that was my chance to rewrite my personal history and reclaim some shred of dignity that was taken from me in my disatrous international television debut. I would return to Oprah triumphantly to declare that I was finally conquering my fat demons and becoming the thin person that I was always meant to be. I fantasized that the new subtitle under my name would read "thinks she'll never be fat again". The drill was pretty much the same only this time I knew to wear solid, dark colors to highlight my ever reducing body frame and try to avoid being filmed on my right side to highlight my much better profile on the left. The limo picked me up and I was practically giddy when I was ushered into the green room and taped up with microphones for my date with redemption. As before, everything went by faster than expected, even though this was not a live taped show. That was the season when the Oprah show decided to split each episode into two half-hour segments. The first half-hour featured helpful hints about watching your weight and eating well while entering the holiday season and the second half-hour was a live show by Micheal Bolton as he hocked his newest Christmas album. Wierd, I know, but I loved every single bizarre moment of it. I got what I came for...a hug and celebratory scream from Oprah, a before and after shot from my previous show to the current show, and plenty of high-fives and "you go girl's" from fellow former fatties on the show. Oprah even introduced me to Michael Bolton shortly after he warbled "Ave Maria" as I sat in the front row a few seats from the daytime talkshow queen. I even got an Oprah mug. Life, however strange, was good.
Except, it really wasn't at all. I was becoming depressed, even though I wouldn't have known to call it that at the time. Workouts became harder as my body began to ache from over-exercising and I was driven beyond reason to keep dropping pounds even though I began to binge on literally dozens of doughnuts and packs of cigarettes after my 4-hour workouts on the weekends. Suddenly I felt compelled to find my way to my thinnest self and felt ever so strongly that I was not going to be able to do it. It felt like life or death. Looking back, I could not see just how lonely and sad my life had become and how I was beginning to bargain with myself to make this unsustainable workout schedule and my desperate attempt to find self-love and approval by losing weight a success. I would spend my weekend nights alone with a bag of candy, a pack of cigarettes, a bottle of wine, and a blockbuster movie, hoping to numb myself to a growing ache in my heart and a knowingness in my mind that something was very, very wrong. As punishment for these binges, I would extend workouts to sometimes a full day and then reward myself with more candy, doughnuts, and overeating...you see the pattern. I was out of control and working overtime to avoid an increasing tide of bad feelings by either over-exercising or over-eating and doing the other to compensate for the other. I believe it is called a vicious cycle for a reason.
Except, it really wasn't at all. I was becoming depressed, even though I wouldn't have known to call it that at the time. Workouts became harder as my body began to ache from over-exercising and I was driven beyond reason to keep dropping pounds even though I began to binge on literally dozens of doughnuts and packs of cigarettes after my 4-hour workouts on the weekends. Suddenly I felt compelled to find my way to my thinnest self and felt ever so strongly that I was not going to be able to do it. It felt like life or death. Looking back, I could not see just how lonely and sad my life had become and how I was beginning to bargain with myself to make this unsustainable workout schedule and my desperate attempt to find self-love and approval by losing weight a success. I would spend my weekend nights alone with a bag of candy, a pack of cigarettes, a bottle of wine, and a blockbuster movie, hoping to numb myself to a growing ache in my heart and a knowingness in my mind that something was very, very wrong. As punishment for these binges, I would extend workouts to sometimes a full day and then reward myself with more candy, doughnuts, and overeating...you see the pattern. I was out of control and working overtime to avoid an increasing tide of bad feelings by either over-exercising or over-eating and doing the other to compensate for the other. I believe it is called a vicious cycle for a reason.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)