Purge

by Nicole Johns

  I’ve used up my bag of ice, and Elaine is scavenging for rocks. I’m somewhat angry but am trying to avoid letting it build up, because I don’t want to let go of the anger, because then I will break down and be sad. It is easier to be angry.

  “Come on, Nicole, I’ve heard you scream—you can be much louder than this. I want to you to throw these rocks as hard as you can and scream about why you are so angry.”

  I’m angry that I am never good enough for my parents.

  I’m angry that I’m not thin.

  I’m angry that my parents won’t let me tell my grandparents where I am.

  I’m angry because I feel like I have no home.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Somewhat irritated.”

  “You need to let go and be angry. I want you to scream it like you mean it and tell me the big things now.”

  I am shaking with emotion because I know I am not going to be able to fake this. There is no way out; it’s just Elaine and me, the lake and the woods, and a pile of rocks representing my anger. I trust Elaine and I know this is my chance to let go; I have been waiting for and dreading this moment all summer. I am sweltering in Elaine’s jacket and the mosquitoes are whining and buzzing around my head. I pick up a smooth, heavy rock and launch it into the lake. I’m angry that Dirk is still teaching at Penn State Erie, and that I had to go through the ordeal of filing a sexual harassment complaint.

  I’m angry that I carry this shame.

  I’m angry that I’m not over this.

  I’m angry that my uncle died.

  I am furious and shaking. Elaine is searching for anything that I can throw into the lake. She sets a bunch of pinecones and sticks beside my feet.

  She says, “You’re getting louder and feeling more, but I know you can do better. I want you to scream over my voice. Come on, Nicole, be louder, throw harder, scream, you can do better than that, louder, you have to be louder, scream . . .”

  I’m angry that I keep everyone’s secrets, I’m angry that I feel like this, I’m angry that I hate my body.

  I feel strange, as if I am hovering above my body, watching this scene unfold from the trees. In technical terms I am dissociating, separating myself from my emotions because they are too intense and I am overloaded.

  Elaine asks me to keep repeating what I am angry about as we walk back to the EDC, and I do. When we reach the EDC, I am completely inside my head, not very aware of my surroundings. I know there are residents outside and I am wearing Elaine’s jacket and muttering about what I’m angry about, and I must look crazy with two large mosquito bites on my forehead.

  Back inside, Elaine and I sit in the conference room and drink water because we are hoarse. Then she pulls out a hand mirror. She asks me what parts of my body I can tolerate or like. I say my eyes. I am to hold the mirror up to my eye and describe objectively what I see. I do this and we move on to my ear, then my elbow.

  Elaine says we’re done, and she asks me how I’m feeling. Her voice sounds distant, even though I know she’s sitting across from me. I have an image in my head that keeps playing on repeat. I am thinking about Dirk’s hands on my thighs as I lie drunk on his sofa, and then there is blackness and I keep wondering about the blank spaces in my memory. I can feel his hands on my thighs in the present moment. I tell Elaine this.

  We walk down the hall to the RC office, where she has me sit across from RC Julia and hold an ice pack. I am to concentrate on the coldness of the ice pack and try to stay present. I clutch the ice pack and try to concentrate on the frozen pellets inside the plastic sheath. I read the instructions for use. But I can’t block out the feelings of Dirk’s hands on my thighs.

  I am stranded in my memories, and time has stopped.

  Faintly, I hear Julia.

  “Nicole, it’s Julia—you are in a safe place, no one is going to hurt you, and you are safe here. You are in Wisconsin, at the EDC; concentrate on the cold of your ice pack and keep your feet on the floor.”

  Someone touches me and I recoil. Julia is replacing my ice pack, since it’s not cold anymore.

  Gradually, I shift into reality. When I lift my head, I see Elaine and Julia. They have both been there the whole time. I am wearing Elaine’s jacket and I don’t know why, but it makes me feel safe. “You had a flashback,” says Elaine.

  I feel shaky, weak, and drained. I give Elaine her jacket and spend the evening in the office with Julia, who talks to me about her upcoming wedding and her recent trip up north. She is keeping things light and keeping me distracted, and I am grateful. At one point in the evening, though, she breaks from her easygoing chatter. “You must be so angry; I can’t imagine how you feel right now.”

  “I hope you never have to find out.”

  Tornado Warnings

  When I was younger, tornado warnings sent me running to the basement in a panic. Thunderstorms could induce major panic attacks in me within minutes, because they might produce tornadoes. As soon as I would see the warnings roll across the bottom of the television screen, I’d start to shake. One July day, back when I lived in Pennsylvania, I saw a funnel cloud descend from the sky in an off-white fury and skip gently across the hills on the other side of the river, just across from our property. I watched, entranced by the tornado’s graceful beauty.

  It is a summer of tornadoes in Wisconsin, and these are not the benign F1 twisters that Pennsylvania thunderstorms occasionally spawn—these are serious F3s that destroy houses and uproot ancient trees. I am at the EDC during the height of tornado season (May to August). There is no basement at the EDC, and that worries me.

  One innocuous August evening, RC Julia clomps down the hall in her black boots, all business.

  “We need to go down to Lower Level right now,” she says.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “There’s a tornado warning, and Lower Level is the safest place in the building.”

  My insides quiver as I gather my journal and the book I am reading. Holly and Laura are giving Julia a hard time. They think tornado warnings are a joke. They wouldn’t think tornado warnings were so funny if they knew that the only way a person can survive an F5 is to ride out the twister in a bomb shelter-like structure.

  The Lower Level hall is lined with eating-disordered patients of all ages and shapes. There are stick-thin teenagers text-messaging their friends on cell phones, there are obese middle-aged women knitting scarves in preparation for a Midwestern winter, and there are teenage boys with feeding tubes sliding out of their noses. Amid the residents are RCs in business casual, soothing the scared and nervous among us.

  For once, I am not scared of the tornadic fury raging above me. Instead, I imagine the ecstasy of being swept into a funnel cloud, those few moments of rapture and flying, before almost certain death. I imagine being swept into the graceful, off-white funnel I saw in Pennsylvania, and how, I like to believe, I would simply surrender to the forces around me and not struggle.

  Nursing Students

  Sarah and Michelle are nursing students from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. They spend a month with us on the premise of learning about psychiatric nursing, particularly eating disorder patients. Sarah and Michelle arrive at the EDC in time to eat breakfast with us in the morning, and leave after our last group of the day.

  They are fascinated and badger us with questions about our personal histories while we try to nap during free time. They volunteer to take us on walks around the hospital grounds and monitor us during snack time. At first we are on our best behavior around Sarah and Michelle, keeping our whining about weight gain and our disdain of Group Therapy to ourselves. However, as summer progresses and their psychiatric nursing rotation draws to a close, Sarah and Michelle see us at the height of our eating disorder- induced mania. They witness Danielle wail when she confronts a sofa cushion stained with crushed Oreos. They see Holly obsess for days about what flavor ice cream she will get for the snack challenge at Cold Stone Creamery. They watch bulimics tear down the hall
after a meal or snack, fly into a bathroom, and purge before anyone can stop them.

  It stings that Sarah and Michelle are our age. All of us are in our early twenties, and we are spending the summer in treatment because we have a nasty habit of sticking our fingers down our throats and horking up our food after a meal, or because we are so petrified of fat grams and calories that we abstain from eating most everything but the safest of foods (raw veggies, coffee, certain fruits). Meanwhile, Sarah and Michelle are in school, while many of us had to take a leave of absence or withdraw. They come dressed in professional attire, while we slink around the EDC in pajamas.

  Sarah and Michelle are everything we are not. They are the type of women we could have been (and perhaps are) sans eating disorders. We begin to resent them—their delving into our pasts and case histories, their silent presence in Group Therapy, and their bright smiles.

  At the end of one of my weekly individual therapy sessions, Therapist Elaine mentions that staff is concerned that I am becoming too close to Eliza, who happens to be a lesbian. I disclosed my bisexuality during Group Therapy shortly after my arrival at the EDC, and was relieved when no one judged me for my sexual preferences. I assure Therapist Elaine that Eliza and I are just friends—we have a lot in common (we both live in the Twin Cities, we both are artsy nerds, we both purge), but we are not engaging in any romantic or sexual activity.

  After individual therapy, I go to lunch with the rest of the floor and begin to think about what Therapist Elaine has implied. If I had been spending extra time with Sarah, a heterosexual resident, would staff have become concerned about our closeness? After lunch I inform Eliza about what Elaine brought up during our session, and we agree that we are being singled out because of our sexuality.

  During the postlunch Group Therapy session, both Eliza and I speak about how we feel persecuted by staff because of our sexuality. Therapist Elaine is glad I am showing my emotions by yelling, which only angers me more. She is deflecting attention away from the issues at hand. All of the residents agree that staff is jumping to conclusions and acting in a ridiculous manner. I demand to know which staff member has informed Therapist Elaine of Eliza’s and my troubling closeness, but she won’t reveal who it was. I say that I wish that staff member had come to me personally instead of using Therapist Elaine as an intermediary.

  Sarah and Michelle are outraged. They are convinced that staff is being homophobic. On our daily walk around the hospital grounds, Sarah and Michelle sputter with rage. Maybe it has something to do with their being our age and taking our side, but Eliza and I feel our anger and frustration are vindicated. For once, we are not the histrionic ones; we are not the ones jumping to conclusions and catastrophizing. Staff members are the ones who need to address their rigid beliefs, not us. We joke that staff needs a special Group Therapy session to address its faulty belief system.

  I often wonder what Sarah and Michelle learned about psychiatric nursing while observing us. What memories of us did they take with them? Did they pity us? Did they think we were chronic, that we would never recover? Or did they see hope within us? Maybe they caught glimpses of our pre-EDC selves glimmering through the pale, vacant shells of our compromised bodies and starved minds. I wonder what they took from their experience at the EDC, those nurses-in-training.

  Prank-Calls

  “Hello, this is Dave from Pizza Hut, and I have six large pizzas for delivery at the Eating Disorders Center.”

  “That has to be a mistake. This is an eating disorder treatment facility; no one here ordered pizzas,” says RC Julia.

  “Ma’am, I have to deliver these.”

  “You have to take them back; no one here is allowed to order pizza.”

  After Laura hangs up, we crack up. All of us were listening to the call, thanks to the speakerphone feature on my new cell phone. RC Julia really thought Pizza Hut was going to be delivering pizza. Later that night, Fred from Krispy Kreme calls.

  “Hi, this is Fred from Krispy Kreme. I have an order for seven dozen Boston Creme doughnuts ready for pickup.”

  “I know this is a resident; you can stop now,” says Julia.

  Laura hangs up and we giggle.

  It passes the time.

  It’s Fun to Weigh at the YMCA

  After working out in the on-campus weight room for two weeks with Recreational Therapist Douglas, I graduate to working out at the local YMCA with a personal trainer, also named Douglas. My two afternoons a week of weight lifting with Recreational Therapist Douglas had consisted of ten minutes of jogging on the treadmill and light weight lifting. These sessions were frustrating, as I wanted to run longer and lift heavier weights; I wanted to burn calories and tone my body, which had grown flabby during my time at the EDC.

  Recreational Therapist Douglas supervised everything I did in the weight room, but after my initial meeting with Personal Trainer Douglas, I am turned loose in the YMCA for an hour and a half three times a week. Personal Trainer Douglas had worked with me on formulating a customized fitness plan that included small amounts of cardio and light weight lifting. I shelved the plan after our initial meeting, and instead headed to the pool, where none of the other EDC residents with YMCA privileges ever ventured, as the pool requires wearing a swimsuit.

  Before entering the pool area, I go through the women’s locker room, which is dangerous territory. In the locker room, I find the most secluded and dark corner and change into my swimsuit while glancing furtively around me, to make sure no one I know is in the locker room (several staff members belong to the YMCA). After I change, I stand in front of a full-length mirror and scrutinize my soft, pale body. Then I walk over to the scale, stare at it suspiciously, and step on gingerly, one hesitant foot at a time.

  Even though I con Dietitian Caroline into disclosing my weight at least once a week, I cannot bypass the scale on my way to the pool. I have always been a scale junkie, sometimes weighing myself up to twenty times a day. During each of my short-term attempts at recovery, I threw out my scale, which meant that I then had to buy a new one when I succumbed to EDNOS. In the past five years, I’ve bought at least five scales.

  After I weigh myself, I head out to the pool. The children’s pool is adjacent to the lap pool, and I watch as the toddlers splash and giggle, slide down the slide, and generally have a good time. At the lap pool I jump in, wet my goggles, and secure my swim cap. In my pre-eating disorder life, I was a swimmer. Week after week at the YMCA, I struggle to find the rhythm I used to know as a girl on the swim team, the rhythm of steady breathing, even strokes, and a trim body that glides through the chlorinated water.

  Instead, I splash and roll; I get water up my nose when I attempt a flip turn. I hate myself for being so out of shape; I hate my body for floundering in the water. Then, gradually, I develop a rhythm. I remember to breathe only on my left side, every third stroke, and everything slides together and I am swimming smooth, even strokes.

  In the water, I am weightless.

  At first, I can swim only three hundred yards. The next week, it’s five hundred. The week after that, seven hundred. The EDC staff tells me I’m exercising too much. I tell them I just want to push myself. Secretly, I want to burn as many calories as possible. After my five-hundredth yard a voice invades my head, telling to me to go faster, swim harder. I’m not good enough. I’m not trying hard enough. It’s the same voice that taunts me when I go running—it whispers, Fat ass, fat ass.

  Despite my asthma, heart problems, and chronically low potassium, I listen to the voice. I swim until the last possible moment, sit in the hot tub for three minutes, weigh myself again to see if I lost weight during my workout, then catch the van back to the EDC, where I confess my transgressions to RC Marie and RC Allison. They relay what I tell them to Dietitian Caroline, who is not pleased and threatens to revoke my YMCA privileges if I find that going there is too triggering. I promise that I won’t weigh myself, that I’ll call the EDC if I need help. But I never do.

  RC Marie tells me th
at she thinks about putting a note on the scale at the YMCA (she works out there in the morning, before her EDC shift) that says, NICOLE, DON’T DO IT. Even though I know no one at the YMCA, the idea of RC Marie placing a note on the scale horrifies me. I beg her not to do it. And she doesn’t, though part of me is touched that RC Marie cares enough to do something like that.

  After I discharge from the EDC, I will avoid going to the gym. Then, to celebrate not having purged for six months, I will join the local YWCA. I will fall in love with the elliptical machine and the largest indoor track in the Twin Cities. I will go to the YWCA every day and spend up to three hours there, doing what I call cross-training: I will spend thirty minutes on the elliptical, run a mile, and swim hundreds of yards. This time, it won’t be about calories and fat grams. It will be about realizing that my body, despite everything I have put it through, works fairly well.

  The YWCA will have a digital scale that displays my weight to a tenth of a pound. I will hop on it before I go swimming and after I sit in the sauna, because maybe I have lost some water weight. I will begin to wonder how much my swimsuit weighs, and I will want to weigh myself naked, but I know people from school are members at the YWCA and I won’t want them to see me naked. Curiosity will win in the end, and I will find out my swimsuit weighs less than a pound, and that I can sweat out up to half a pound of water weight in the sauna.

  I will have transcendent experiences while listening to Liz Phair’s self-titled album as I run laps on the track. All the anger, sadness, and rage will exit my body. This will be better than therapy. Perhaps my body has held on to all these emotions, and this is their only way out. I will begin to think sweating is a form of mourning. Our bodies remember.

  The YWCA is where I will learn how other people live and move in their bodies. I will observe children running around bare-foot in the Fit Kids Gym, I will watch mothers-to-be with rounded abdomens enjoying the sensation of weightlessness in the pool while they do prenatal water aerobics, and I will see a middle-aged woman with slashes across her chest from a double mastectomy sit naked in the sauna, unashamed. I will also bear witness to slender teenage girls stepping on the scale and berating themselves. I will want to tape a note to the scale that says, DON’T DO IT.