Kiera Lee's Story - Health - http://maxpages.com/elliesownpage/Kiera_Lees

Well, where do I begin? This will hardly scratch the surface but here goes. Well, it all started when I was about 14, my body was changing shape, bits of me were sticking out but nothing seemed to be going in. I also started to develop a real social life; I would come home from school and go out with my friends till late and then come back, do my homework and go to bed. I started skipping evening meals, and weight started to fall off me. Then I discovered smoking, and then started skipping dinner as well because my dinner money would be spent on cigarettes. After this had been going on for about a year, a girl in my class was admitted to hospital for a long time with anorexia. That is when I realized that I had an eating disorder.

I didn't want to follow in her footsteps so I slowly started to eat again. After about a year, things were looking up and I was almost recovered, when I suddenly started skipping meals again in the evenings. I would lie to my parents and say that I had eaten round at a friends or that I had brought something. When I was 15 I was grounded for a month for saying that I was stopping at a friends when I stayed at some student flats and went out clubbing. It was then that I discovered purging. I was in all the time and was always in when tea was ready, so after tea I would go and run a bath and use the sound of the water to cover up my purging. When the month ended, well three weeks in the end, the purging didn't stop and all of a sudden I was getting kicks out of it. I loved the fact that I could control something, what I didn't realize was that it was controlling me.

At about 16 or 17 I had been out one evening with some friends and came home to find my mum strapped to a heart monitor that took her blood pressure every hour. She was medically diagnosed with stress. Was this my fault? Did she know about my Ed? Was it making her ill? These were the sorts of questions that now went around in my head. I ended up thinking that it was all my fault. I had never been the easiest of kids, me and my brother were always fighting or arguing, was this what had brought it on? Now I used my Ed to punish myself. Every day that I came home and found my mum still sitting in the same chair where she had been when I had gone out in the morning, still staring at the same blank t.v screen it tore a little bit more of my heart.

To punish myself, I started to cut out certain foods and punish myself with grueling exercises. Every sit-up, every push-up, every stretch I reminded myself about what I had done to my mum, it made me exercise harder and faster until I could do nearly 1000 sit-ups a night. This carried on all the way through college, in fact looking back I have no idea how I actually made it through college. My mum was on the mend and I used to help her once a week to do the shopping, when she was well enough to leave the house. This was not out of guilt but out of love and caring for her, I was willing to help my mum to get better. She got better in the end but the ED still stayed, not as bad as it had been but it was still there in the shadows. When I was 18 I went to university and I felt alone somehow, my boyfriend at the time was really pissing me off and I wanted some freedom from him, so what does he do?

He starts stalking me. This made things worse, I didn't feel that I could talk to my mum because it might trigger her illness and my dad worked all the hours that God sent. Then they announced that dad had got a new job and they would be moving over a hundred miles away. I hit rock bottom and couldn't cope, i left uni, and moved back home. i had also met someone new at uni, j i moved back to be with him a couple of weeks later, my dad moved me out and i cried all the way there and just wanted to tell him to turn the car around and go back, but after all of his time and effort spent helping me I just couldn't. Then j and I found a flat together.

Things started off o.k and then I found out what a control freak he liked to be. If he didn't get his own way then the verbal and emotional abuse started. i threatened to leave him a few times and one time i handed in my notice at work and my dad was going to get a van and move me out of there, i gave in to J's pleas for forgiveness and he told me he would change, he did for about a week and then went back to his old ways. One night he became violent and trashed the flat. i threatened to leave him again, and again gave in to his pleas, he then went on an anger management course which made things day. i felt like it was the only way that i could cope easier and he started to get better for a while but by now the purging after regular meals now turned into binge/purging up to 6 or 7 times, then the bombshells stated hitting: first J's parents split up and he found it really hard to cope with, he became argumentative and selfish. He wouldn't talk to me and spent hours making his mum's life a living hell, he was also starting to turn against me again and became possessive of me and started accusing me of having affairs like his mum had done.

Second, my granddad died, it wasn't unexpected but it hit me hard, the night that my dad phoned to tell me, j just said "oh I'm sorry" and went out to work. No cuddle, no words of support, he wouldn't go with me to the funeral, it's not that he couldn't but wouldn't. On the day of the funeral I tried to phone him but the line was always busy. I needed support and comfort but couldn't get through to him. The funeral was horrible, I hate them. Third, I was on the computer the day before Valentine's Day and for some reason I was looked through the cache files. Every so often there was a reference to someone named Angel Paula, so I investigated more. What I found was e-mails and chat scripts between them both, which showed that they had been having a sort of cyber relationship for nearly 7 months. I confronted him and at first he denied it and then bit by bit more and more truth started to come through and I was shocked. Once again I was alone, the one person I lived with and trusted had betrayed me big time, or was I over reacting?

I felt so ashamed about what he had done that I couldn't tell anyone. Then I hit rock bottom, I found a phone bill for the previous quarter, and what did I find he had been doing whilst I was at my granddad's funeral? No, he wasn't on the net, he was phoning her in New Zealand. I flipped, became withdrawn and didn't eat anything for three weeks. I eventually ended up at the doctors and was put on anti depressants. I took them but they didn't seem to help so I didn't bother with them, I thought I was strong enough to cope but boy was I wrong.

By now I was having irregular periods and had suffered with swollen salivary glands, tooth decay, insomnia, constipation, dehydration and diarrhea amongst other problems. We eventually decided that I had to move back to stafford where I felt "safe" not safe as in safe from harm, but that is the only safe-feeling place I could remember. We found a house to rent and things got better -- for a while, but soon enough I slipped back into my old ways. We brought a wreck of a house and started doing it up. Living in a building site was really depressing and soon we ran out of money and nothing could be done till pay day, and when payday came and the bills had been paid, there wasn't much left over to spend on the house, so things started to move really slowly.

Being depressed again, I became worse, so bad in fact that I was going out to work one morning, when standing in a bus stop I started to feel dizzy and then sweaty and hot and shaky. I got onto the bus and the last thing that I remember is the driver asking if I was all right and me replying that I felt sick. About 5 minutes later I woke up lying on the floor, staring at the wheel arch of the bus. I had collapsed and fallen backwards out of the bus and landed on the pavement. Seconds later the ambulance arrived and took me to hospital. On the way I phoned work to tell them that I wouldn't be in and then I phoned j he then phoned my mum and confessed all, (he had found out just before Easter and we went to the doctors to get help, the doc had referred my to the local Ed clinic). My mum then phoned the hospital to tell them what was really wrong. I had blood tests and an ECG and they checked the backs of my eyes because I had hit my head.

And then the doc tells me I'm dehydrated and need fluids and rest; he also told me that my mum had phoned and told him everything. I couldn't get out of there quick enough. So now my mum knew and well the whole family knew really. My mum came up to see me and we had a little talk. She told me that her illness wasn't my fault, it was to do with work and it was nothing that I had done. When she had gone, I cried, I cried like I would never stop. I never knew this before, if only I had known then what I know now. This basically brings me to where I am now, I haven't had a period in nearly 4 months, I am underweight and can't sleep, my boss has called me in to the office to ask me if I am eating properly. My appointment isn't for another month and facing up to all the stuff that has happened really scares the shit out of me.

I want to keep hiding behind it, but I know that if I don't face up to it then the ed has won, and next time I might not walk out of hospital!

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Ellie

United States

help4eds@yahoo.com

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Page Updated Sun Aug 12, 2001 11:20pm EDT