As a toddler, I spoke before I walked, but I walked right on time too. I hit all my milestones early. My mom had a Master’s degree in early childhood education. She consulted at multiple daycare centers and nursery schools. Some days she would bring me with her to work to show me off. I would ace all of the baby developmental screenings. The other teachers and educators would watch in awe. Back then there was no talk about me having an eating disorder.
In third grade, I began my descent into chronic illness. My skin, hair, and mouth became extremely dry. I started getting frequent pounding headaches.
From kindergarten to the first part of fifth grade, I attended a private Jewish day school, where every day began with a morning prayer service. The Orthodox Jewish Prayer service consists of multiple parts where you remain standing for prolonged periods of time.
Starting in third grade, it became an intense struggle for me to remain standing. My exhaustion threatened to sweep me off my feet and knock me out. It was so bad that I couldn’t focus on the prayers in the Hebrew prayerbook. My feet would ache, go numb, and tingle from standing for ten minutes straight.
Everyone else was praising God and praying for peace, happiness, healing, and safety. Instead, I would find myself praying for the service to be over. All I wanted was to sit down and remain sitting.
Also, around age eight, I noticed I was rarely hungry anymore. Then I started having pain and nausea that began whispering in every time I ate or drank anything at lunch. I decided I had better stop eating lunch at school. It had nothing to do with wanting to lose weight, or anything like that. I did not have an eating disorder.
“Why are you coming home with full lunchboxes?” my mom asked me.
“I can’t eat lunch, it makes me sick,”
My mom took me to Dr, Monroe. She listened to my stomach and pressed on it in a few places. Then she insisted there was absolutely nothing wrong with it.
“I think this is some sort of behavioral issue,” she whispered to my mom, not realizing I could overhear her. Because the pediatrician had dubbed it a behavioral issue, my mom pestered me about it non-stop.
Sometimes on the weekends, I would try to force myself to eat lunch. It was just to get my mom off my case. That always ended up in me feeling so sick and throwing up, which my mom called “working myself up”.
In the third grade, I was still eating breakfast, dinner, and an afterschool snack. This prevented my mom from harassing me too much. Her food policing was tolerable at first.
Then summer rolled around and the end of third grade. I turned nine on July 2nd and had my nine-year-old check-up.
“She’s falling off the growth chart for weight. For height, she’s in the fifteenth percentile and barely hanging on.” Dr. Monroe informed us.
My mom chimed in that I was still refusing to eat lunch.
“I don’t even know if it’s safe for her to keep doing gymnastics practice and competitions,” my mom added
The Eating Disorder Misdiagnosis
A nine-year-old gymnast on a high-pressure competitive team, refusing to eat lunch.
Dr. Monroe immediately hit me with a barrage of questions to the tune of, “was I trying to lose weight?” “Did I think I was fat?” “Was anyone else on the team on a diet?” “Did coach make any comments to me about my weight?”.
I didn’t realize it back then, but the wheels were already turning in her head. She was already assuming I had nothing wrong with me beyond an eating disorder.
Not once did the pediatrician ask me why I wasn’t eating lunch. She didn’t ask me if my stomach hurt, or if I was getting nauseous. Instead, she threatened me.
“In six months, you need to come back for another appointment. If you’ve lost any more weight, then you will have to stop gymnastics.”
Six months later I still couldn’t tolerate eating lunch, but I had also stopped stomaching the after-school snacks as well. However, I had broken away from innocence even further. Out of pure desperation, I had grown manipulative
At school, I would open up the lunch bag that my mom had packed for me. Then I would pull bite-size pieces out of the sandwich. I would toss those pieces in the trash until I got down to the crust which I never ate. Then I would put the torn-down crust back in the plastic baggie in the lunch bag. It would end up looking exactly like I had eaten the sandwich. After that, I would dump some snacks in the trash. Of course, I would leave some behind so that it would look like I had eaten most of the snack. Then I would do the same thing with the drink.
We had developed a system where I would get a sticker on a chart every time I ate lunch. When I filled up the sticker chart I could pick out a new stuffed animal from the toy store. The therapist Dr; Monroe suggested had come up with the idea.
My parents saw me “eating” my lunch and gave me stickers, so I kept filling up my charts and I would pick out stuffed animals from the toy store as rewards. To this day I still feel guilty looking at those stuffed animals that I didn’t really earn.
The therapist didn’t listen to a thing I had to say. The only helpful advice she gave me was to write down my feelings in a journal. So, my mom and I went to Barnes and Noble and spent an hour picking out the perfect black leather journal that would be the first in a lengthy series of journals that I would use until this very day. That was the beginning of my addiction to writing and recording and trying to make some purpose of this hell that I was wading through; so that maybe I’d either figure out how to make things better or at least somehow help someone else maneuver through their own hell easier.
However, journal or no journal, at nine and a half years old, I had to go to the six-month follow-up visit my pediatrician had threatened me with. I had lost another six pounds, she explained to me that I was spilling protein into my urine .
“It means that your kidneys are showing signs of damage because you are literally starving your body to death.,” Dr. Monroe explained to me,
I went through the first couple stages of grief over the next 18 months after I had to quit the heart and soul of my life…gymnastics.
After hours a day at practices and competitions, I had made it to the level six team at a highly competitive gym. My entire life revolved around gymnastics and possibly making Nationals or maybe even the Olympics someday. It had been like that since I made team when I was seven. I’d been doing gymnastics since I was four.
Losing gymnastics was like losing a chunk of myself. After that, it felt like my life was meaningless and empty. Instead of going to practice after school I would go home, lay down on my bed and sleep all afternoon. My whole body felt too drained to do anything else, and I think a lot of that was emotional.
By the first third of fifth grade, I had reached the point where I was only surviving on two to three 32-ounce bottles of Gatorade a day. My parents were in official freak-out mode and were insisting that there was nothing wrong with my stomach or my body; both of which were going totally haywire. Where my parents got their PhDs in accounting and early childhood development changed into medical degrees I don’t know. All the while, my pediatrician insisted that I was an anorexic ex-gymnast with an atypical eating disorder.
No matter how much I tried to explain to people that my stomach felt like it had rocks grinding around inside it and banging off the soft flesh of my internal organs, no one listened. No matter how hard I tried to explain that my stomach felt so distended and full that it was like I had eaten three meals, no one listened. No one noticed a thing when my stomach made me look like I was bloated or even pregnant. No matter how hard I tried to explain the cramping, shooting, stabbing pains that shot through me when I tried to drink the Gatorade; that I had by the last third of fifth grade stopped drinking except for little sips, no one listened.
At that point in my life, I had weekly pediatrician appointments, weekly therapy appointments, and bi-weekly psychiatry appointments with a psychiatrist that had diagnosed me with child-onset depression and an anxiety disorder and had put my ten-year-old self on a kiddie dose of Prozac.
Soon weekly pediatrician visits became twice a week, then three times a week, then daily. My urine showed that I was continuing to spill more and more protein into it. In addition to that, my urine had ketones in it; a laboratory marker of starvation. As my blood pressure bottomed out lower, my heart rate fluttered higher and higher. I noticed that my hair was beginning to fall out. The entirety of my body was wracked with tremors. When I walked around, my whole body shook, and I would almost pass out. My hazel eyes had sunken in with dark circles smeared underneath them, even my face looked bony.
Despite the fact that I was ten and a half years old, I could easily have passed for an emaciated five-year-old. At my lowest weight back then I weighed 38 pounds at four feet tall. The average size of other girls my age was about 4’6 and 72 pounds. I had completely fallen off the growth charts.
Everyone blamed it on this non-existent eating disorder.
I knew I was too skinny. If I could eat or drink something and hold it down my first plan would be to go to an all-you-can-eat-buffet and stuff my face. At the very least, I would eat an ice cream sundae with my gymnastics team. The problem was, that I had some sort of physical issue stopping me from eating.
We were living in a pressure cooker at home. My parents insisted that I could eat if I wanted to and that I was just being stubborn. Other times they told me I needed to work harder in therapy because I obviously had some type of deep-seated psychological trauma I needed to work through and I was refusing to work on it.
“There’s something physically wrong with me, I need to see an emergency doctor, I need someone different to look at my stomach and figure out why it’s not working right, it’s very very sick, I could die,” I would shout back.
My parents were constantly playing food police with me. I had to put up with them yelling at me all the time. One month after I had completely stopped eating, I started having daily doctor’s appointments that my parents had to drive me to. I got a lot of attention, but I hated it. My brothers both had a lot of serious issues as well, but my parents couldn’t handle dealing with three special needs kids at once. Michael (my 2-year-old brother) threw marathon temper tantrums when he misplaced a Duplo leg piece, and half the time was afraid to play with his toys because he might get them dirty. Neither of my parents put too much thought into it. They were too busy trying to stop me from starving to death. They kept canceling Michael’s play therapy appointments and putting him on the back burner. My life was in immediate danger, Michael’s wasn’t.
Jonathan (my 5-year-old brother) was struggling in kindergarten. The teacher thought he was on the autism spectrum and had a severe learning disability and needed testing. Again, Jonathan wasn’t in immediate danger of dying so my issues were front and center. It’s been twenty years, and they still resent me for that.
“Just eat something,” Jonathan kept telling me.
“I can’t” I tried to tell him, just like I told everyone else who wouldn’t listen. I knew he and Max were suffering because of this and the guilt was thick and goopy and engulfing me, but there was nothing else I could do about it.
There was a lot of yelling, arguing, and walking around on eggshells on everyone’s part. My brothers were stuck in a suspended gel-like animation with everything that was going on. They walked around with wide, bug-eyed, eyes, and hunched-up shoulders as if they expected chunks of our lives to come crashing down on their heads.
My brothers didn’t really understand what was going on, but the fear and anguish in the house hung so heavy it almost left a smell in the air. We were living in a situation that was made up of the elements used to build nightmares.