Moving forward back to who I used to be

I’m going to a club tonight. I’ve never been to a club before but I know it’s not really my scene. Nate’s friend is having her birthday party there and he got me on the list. I don’t know her but I do know her boyfriend, or I did.

These are Nate’s friends, they used to be mine too. They’re people I used to hang out with a lot a year and a half ago, people I had fun with, people I partied with, people I had become friends with, that is until my world fell apart and I isolated myself with my eating disorder. Nate has stuck around though.

He’s one of the nicest guys and I can’t believe he still likes me. Likes me enough to text me every weekend to hang out and does whatever I ask. I don’t know if I want to be just friends or more than friends but if I want to hang on to him while I figure it out, I’m eventually going to have to actually hang out with him in person.

And I want my friends back. It’s not like we’re not friends because of a fight or anything but how can you be friends with people if you never see them or talk to them? I mean I sort of just disappeared off the face of the planet. And I miss them. They were so fun to be around and so laid back. And I really enjoyed hanging out with Nate’s friends.

So here I am. I’ve basically come full circle and I’m so grateful that I’m at a place where I can even think about trying to revive my social life. Things might be weird since it’s been a while since I’ve really hung out with these people and even longer since I was actually fun at a party, but I’m sure things will be fine. They aren’t the type to hold grudges.

Too many doctors

I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow, the one for the abnormal pap smear. I’m dreading it. I’ve had enough of doctors for right now. My anxiety has been steadily building through out the past week.

Filling out the new patient forms was stressful, I lied.

One of the questions was “Do you have an eating disorder (anorexia or bulimia)?” and I checked “No”. Technically, I didn’t meed the diagnostic criteria for either and as of right now, I would say that I am not engaging in many eating disorder behaviors.

The next question was “Are you on a diet?” and I was about to check “Yes” because almost everyone is on some sort of diet but I figured it was safer to just check “No”.

I did however check the yes box for working out even though I no longer work out as regularly as I once used to but I’m planning on starting again.

Part of me still thinks that if I keep pretending that nothing is wrong, everything will be fine, and I’m so tempted to skip my appointment tomorrow.

Also adding stress to my life is having to find and book my own doctors appointments around a full-time work schedule. I still need to find a dentist and schedule an appointment, and I was supposed to go in February. I also need to find a psychiatrist here because I can’t get my normal 90-day supply anymore for some reason and it is very impractical to have my parents mail it to me every month because it’s very expensive. So that is extremely stressful because my plan and 3 back-up plans have now fallen through.

I refuse to go back to the doctor at my health center because she was awful. Luckily my parents aren’t making me go back there at this point because I told them that I didn’t like her and she made me really uncomfortable. As a last resort, I might try seeing another doctor there but I have a feeling that won’t go very well either.

I also have to schedule an appointment with my regular doctor because I’ve been having the weirdest abdominal pains. It feels like there is a knife jabbed in my abdomen and it’s twisting around. It’s the oddest thing. It just happens randomly but it happens at least once a day. I’m going to have to start keeping track of it or I’m going to sound like an idiot trying to describe it to the doctor. It’s been going on for a while and I’ve been trying to just ignore it in hopes that it will go away but it’s been at least a month now so I think I should get it checked out if it doesn’t go away in the next week or so.

So if you can’t tell, I’ve been dealing with so many doctors and so many appointments and I don’t like doctors appointments to begin with. It wouldn’t be so bad if I were at home because all of my doctors are set up at home and I like them and I’m comfortable with them and I don’t have to book my own appointments. I hate new things and I hate change. I can’t handle all of this. I don’t want to be a grown-up anymore.

I’m pretty amazed that I haven’t started restricting again to deal with the stress.

Skeletons in the closet never stay hidden

Tags

disordered eating, doctors, eating disorder, eating disorders, EDNOS

Today I had a doctor’s appointment to get a refill on Adderall and it was a disaster. The doctor had really poor social skills and the weirdest eyes ever. Anyways, she didn’t have a chance to review my file yet so she began by asking me to tell her about my ADHD so I did. I got diagnosed my junior year of high school and was prescribed Adderall for it. I could sense that she was skeptical about it so I told her about my family history with ADHD (my dad has a mild form of it and my younger brother was diagnosed with it many years ago). By the time I finished explaining why my doctor back home couldn’t just send me a prescription (getting a prescription filled from another state is difficult, let alone a prescription for stimulants across the country), she had read through my chart and gotten to the part about my eating disorder and the few therapy sessions I’ve had.

She was very insistent that I see a therapist already for the ADHD even though I don’t need to but once she read that I had an eating disorder, (I’m still not convinced I have/had one, I go back and forth) she wanted me in therapy even more. I told her that I’m doing extremely well, I’ve hardly restricted since starting my internship, I’m eating almost normally, I have a social life, and I’m happy. But it didn’t matter to her. She wanted my entire health history sent to her from my doctor back home so she could review it and even then there were no guarantees.

Letting my school have a copy of my entire medical record so that my other doctor at school can see them and possibly contact my doctor at home? Ummm no thanks. Plus my weight has been consistently lower each time I’ve gone home so I highly doubt that would convince her to prescribe Adderall to me since her main reason was “Adderall is extremely contraindicated with people who have a history of eating disorders and you have had trouble maintaining your weight”. Ugh. My stupid breakdown last year that caused me to spill my guts to a stupid therapist and then agreeing to “recovery” is coming back to haunt me. But seriously though, the weekly/bi-weekly weigh-ins I had for like 2 months before I decided I had enough and didn’t want “recovery” anymore only showed me losing like 8lbs. That’s not that much and I was never underweight. Plus I’m fine now. And god knows what the stupid therapists I saw the few times I put up with it wrote in my file…

I can’t see this ending well at all so I called my mom and told her that I couldn’t get the prescription because the doctor wanted my entire medical record sent to her to review and that I couldn’t get another appointment for 3 weeks which by that time, I’d run out. So my mom is going to get the script from my doctor back home, fill it, and then mail it to me. Thank god.

The cherry on top was that she finished with “since you weren’t diagnosed until your junior year of high school, it can’t possible be that severe and going off Adderall isn’t that big of a deal. There aren’t any major complications that could happen. You just won’t be able to concentrate as well which could be uncomfortable.” Seriously?!?!? Uncomfortable?? What a weird choice of words. Not being able to concentrate is not “uncomfortable”, it’s annoying and frustrating and sometimes embarrassing. I can live without Adderall and I agree my ADHD isn’t that severe but life is so much easier when I can actually focus on things. The fact that I can focus sometimes without it doesn’t mean that I should have to. I shouldn’t have to spend 10x longer doing things that could be done in a fraction of the time just because some stupid bitch decides that my ADHD is just an inconvenience to me and medications to make life a little easier and more manageable aren’t necessary.

Well Adderall is a necessity to me because I can concentrate so much better at work which makes me like my job so much more because I am good at it and can also answer clinical questions because I can focus and think. Without Adderall, I don’t think I would be doing as an amazing job as my boss thinks I am doing because I would be much more forgetful, spacey, and just off my game. That would probably cause me to engage in eating disordered behaviors again because I would feel like a failure and I would be so hard on myself that it would end up like my last internship, which was what caused me to start restricting again in the first place.

As if doctors didn’t make me anxious enough already, this totally did not help. I have another doctors appointment next week for more tests because of my abnormal pap smear. There’s actually another crazy story about doctors to go along with that but I’ll spare you guys from having to read all about that drama. I’m nervous enough for it already and now I’m even more anxious about it thanks to today’s fiasco.

Anyways, sorry this is a super long post, I just needed to vent. I promise to try posting more regularly too.

I’m not a girl, not yet a woman

Tags

cancer, disordered eating, eating disorder, eating disorders, EDNOS, fear, pap smear

***Disclaimer this post is about “womanly issues” or whatever so if it makes you uncomfortable, please stop reading***

In had a conversation with Scarlett a while ago, I half-jokingly said, as awful as it sounds, I wish I had a disease like cancer or something that have actual successful treatments with the possibility of a full recovery instead of an eating disorder. What I meant was I wish full recovery was possible for eating disorders, not just symptom management, but when the thoughts and compulsions actual go away completely. I think God took it the wrong way because it’s coming back to bite me in the ass.

About a month ago I went to the doctor to get the HPV vaccine and made myself get a pap smear I’ve been putting off for years. My phone has been sort of messed up and hasn’t been giving me voice mail notifications so I had no idea my doctor had called to discuss the results, well I sort of did when I saw the missed call but I figured she was calling to say everything was normal. Anyways about a week later I got a call from the ob/gyn office with referral and since I had no idea what they were talking about, I said they were mistaken and they sent the referral back.

Fast-forward a couple weeks and I got another call from my doctor. I called back to follow-up and I found out from a nurse that my pap smear came back with some abnormalities. I talked to about 5 different nurses, both in the internal med and ob/gyn departments, because I couldn’t get a hold of my doctor and none of them really told me what my results said. The last nurse from the ob/gyn department was the most helpful and nicest. As she was trying to figure out how to schedule me, she told me what sorts of tests/procedures they normally do after getting results like mine but then she finished with I’m not sure what to do in your case though because you’re so young. I’m going to have a doctor review your case to come up with a plan of care and give you a call back.

The doctor ended up calling me after hours which was surprising. She was really nice but I’m not 100% confident in her abilities because she said she wasn’t sure what the next step should be because my case was “unusual” and that she was going to consult some other people and speak to the head of cytology. It’s totally not what you would want to hear but I guess we’ll figure things out. I’m supposed to call back on Friday to see what the next step is going to be.

So I decided to google it and it definitely did not put me at ease at all. In fact, it probably made it worse because I learned that what I have is the rarer abnormality and is trickier to diagnose the cause and to treat it.

So now I’m convinced I have cancer even though I know it’s the worst case scenario. I know I shouldn’t freak out until I have more tests done and I’m sure but I just can’t help it. I know cytology is not an exact science and there is a lot of interpretation involved but that isn’t really comforting.

I’m scared. I don’t know what to do. I’m only 21 years old. I’m way too young for this. I feel like I’m still a kid and I have no idea what I’m doing most of the time. I can’t handle this. This isn’t happening. Maybe if I ignore it, it’ll just go away.

If you can hear me God, I didn’t mean it, I’m sorry, I take it back.

Second day hangover?

Gosh I have so much I want to write about. The past few days have been literally unbelievable and I’m still trying to process them. I promise to write a real post tomorrow.

I felt really crappy all day today. Sort of like a hangover type feeling but I’m not hungover. It’s weird because I feel a lot worse than I felt yesterday and I definitely thought I would be more hungover yesterday than I actually was. Today I felt more of like an exhausted, slightly nauseous, sort of dizzy, kind of out-of-it feeling and the coffee I had at lunch did not help at all. It probably actually made it worse since it added heart palpitations into the mix which made me even more tired because it makes me kind of short of breath. Not the best idea I’ve ever had but I never seem to learn that I shouldn’t have coffee.

So by the end of the day I was pretty nauseous but I had dinner plans with a friend at one of our dining halls. I was feeling so sick that all I could even think about eating was a bowl of cereal and some tea. At least my friend also felt sort of sick too so she wasn’t in the mood to eat much either and didn’t think anything of it. I really hope I feel better tomorrow because I hate feeling sick.

I just found out my best friend from home is coming to visit! I am so excited but it also means I really have to clean my room. I guess that’s what I’ll be doing all this week because my room is a disaster. I’m excited but I also don’t really have people stay over because I like my space and my privacy. I guess I’ll just have to get over it because I really do want her to come.