*Survivors*

     I asked my friends from treatment if they would like to share their story on my blog. My friend Dena offered, this is her story. I love Dena so much, she is such an inspiration to me. She is full of strength and courage. I've seen her struggle a lot while she was in treatment, but the fact that she made it through is so awesome. She's been through so much, yet she was able to recover. She also taught me how to crochet while we were in treatment together. ;) She makes me believe that recovery is possible. I hope you find her story as inspiring as I do. 
Thanks again Dena for sharing your story on my blog. I love you!

My issues with food didn’t really begin until I was in college. I struggled with my emotions for a long time before. Everything started when I was 14. I was bullied really badly and it really broke me down. I would be told these horrible things like, “you should kill yourself, and no one cares about you anyway”. In my head my only defense, the only thing that made me better than them, was the fact that I was thinner than them. I was a dancer and pretty thin and fit.
If that wasn’t hard enough, my uncle died that year. Those two things alone could break someone but for me that wasn’t it. I was raped by a kid I knew at school.
For years after that I struggled with self-injury and depression. I was in and out of hospitals for suicidal ideation and eventually, suicide attempts.
When I started college, I joined the crew team. My bipolar medications made me gain a significant amount of weight and I was excited to be able to lose it by working out. That same time, I started restricting. I’m not sure why it started but things went downhill fast. I lost a ton of weight that year, but I still didn’t like myself. Eventually I had to stop rowing because I was to weak and passed out at a race.
The self-injury was interwoven with the ED. I would eat something then punish myself by self-injuring. Eventually I was so into my eating disorder, the self-injury stopped.
I started having major health issues a year and a half from when my ED started. I was rushed to the hospital one day after I couldn’t move. It was like my muscles just stopped working. Even the muscles in my mouth stopped working so the EMT’s thought I was on drugs. The hospital staff told me I had a potassium level of 1.7, which is critically low, what I call “heart attack level”. What happens is that potassium helps your muscles function. When your body doesn’t have enough, your muscles don’t function properly, your heart is a muscle so it can stop when your levels are that low. Clinically, I should have had a heart attack, I’m not sure why I didn’t, but today I am so grateful I didn’t.
My health was pretty okay after that. I made it through college without any major issues. The summer after college things went downhill. I was in and out of the emergency room and just spiraling out of control. I entered my first IOP program around the time I started graduate school for social work. It was pretty impossible to recover doing grad school classes full time with a 21 hour a week internship working 15 hours a week, all while doing IOP three hours a day. Things got even worse. I ended up stopping school and doing PHP, which was 6 hours a day. Still, I wasn’t eating when I wasn’t in program (I was on my own for breakfast, lunch and a snack.) I quickly got moved to residential. I went to Renfrew in Philadelphia. I tried so hard while I was there and finished all my meals. Because the food piece was better, the self-injury came back. I needed some way to cope. Also, that was the beginning of my PTSD. When I wasn’t numbing myself from restricting, all the ugly memories from the rape came back.
I left Renfrew after 5 weeks. As soon as I got home I started restricting again. I just couldn’t deal with all of the PTSD stuff. I was in PHP and I ended up in the psych ward again because I was feeling suicidal. My eating disorder was out of control. It was there where I started purging. I made the decision there to go back to Renfrew. I was only at Renfrew for 2/12 weeks this time because I got kicked out for self-injuring. At this point I wasn’t eating much at all. I felt hopeless. I attempted suicide again after 4 years since my previous attempt. I almost died. I spent 6 days in the hospital, then 4 days in the psych ward, where I was passing out numerous times. I got transferred to an eating disorder inpatient unit where I spent 4 days in a wheel chair because my blood pressure was critically low.
I never thought I would get to that point where I wouldn’t be able to walk. That was a low point for me. I stayed there for two weeks, at the end of which, I got transferred to Timberline Knolls, where I spent six months working on my eating disorder, self-injury, BPD (which I was diagnosed with at 15), and PTSD. Things were really rocky for a long time, especially with the BPD and PTSD. The eating disorder was pretty good from the beginning. I finished every meal, some with a supplement for a little while, and I was ED behavior free the entire time I was there.
I left TK last September and I moved to LA to a transitional living program. Things were going really well for a while, and then my friend from TK passed away. She was the 5th person I lost this year, including my grandfather when I was at TK, and 3 other close friends. I spiraled downward for a while and I am just starting to get back to where I was. I was doing so well for so long that I forgot that struggling is part of recovery and that I can choose to let things bring me down or I can rise above.