Some years ago, I wrote a book about my ten days in an eating disorder treatment center. It was never published, but now I feel like sharing some of it. I’m going to post random chapters to be enjoyed in little servings like this.
–Juliana
The bathroom doors are locked so no one can vomit after meals. I must get an RC to unlock the door for me and then the RC waits, standing just outside the stall, until I am finished. This is called “supervised” bathroom access. I am new and can’t be trusted yet. They need to observe me for a week’s time. If in that time I prove I am not a puking risk I will be upgraded to “tapered” or unsupervised access. But at “tapered” status, one cannot use the bathroom until a full hour has passed after a meal. (I assume this is so the food can be digested enough so that it can’t be easily vomited up like it can be directly following a meal.)
I quickly realize that being all alone in the bathroom, with no one hovering, is a great privilege. It is a freedom that I have taken for granted my whole life.
As a “supervised” status designee, I can either count (“1, 2, 3…”), loudly enough for the RC to hear, the whole time I am on the toilet (it’s hard to talk and barf at the same time), or I can pee silently and have the RC come into the stall and flush the toilet for me the very second I am done with my business. The “flushing” option allows the RC to immediately, post-elimination, inspect the contents of the toilet for evidence of purging.
But I have never been a purger. I always thought that vomiting after a binge was cheating. If I ate too much (or what I thought was too much), starving myself afterward was the penance I had to pay for being so weak—for not being able to control myself; my appetites, my emotions, my destiny, my life.
In the mornings, an RC sits on a chair in the bigger bathroom (the one with the showers in it) while girls shower, one in each of the two stalls, staggering morning ablutions with health checks in the front room (showers are only allowed in the morning before breakfast). The RC might work on—or pretend to work on—a crossword puzzle or play Sudoku or scan the newspaper while monitoring, listening for sounds of retching coming from the curtained showers.
At first, I don’t understand why a girl can’t just secretly vomit into the wastebasket, or a drawer, in her room—there is no supervision of our rooms, and no checking on us, and doors are closed whenever we want during periods of free time. I suppose the smell would eventually give the girl away, and then she would be in trouble.
I wake up around three a.m., my body covered in a slimy film of sweat, needing to pee. I walk down the dark hallway, quiet and still as death, past the bathrooms and then around the curved wall to the overnight monitor’s perch behind the glass doors in the office in the front of the building. Tonight it’s Farah and she’s dozing in her chair with her head on the desk in front of the sleeping computer and I feel bad about needing to disturb her. But the bathrooms are locked. And I must be monitored while I’m on the toilet.
I knock on the glass and Farah lifts her head and I say, loudly enough for her to hear me through the glass: “Sorry,” and then: “I need to use the bathroom, please. Thanks.”
Farah is visibly annoyed. All the patients have been complaining about Farah. (Deb: “Farah’s kind of a bitch.” Darcy: “She acts like she’s doing us a favor when she gets up off her ass to let us into the bathroom. Isn’t that what she’s paid for?” Jess: “She scowled at me.”) She moves very slowly—exaggeratedly slowly, it seems—with no evident concern for how badly I need to empty my bladder after all the liquids I’ve been made to drink. She grabs the bathroom key, opens the office door, lumbers with her big hips and thighs around the curved wall and down the hallway ahead of me, unlocks the bathroom door and asks in a monotone, “Count or flush?”
“Flush,” I answer.
And when I am done and Farah pokes her head into the stall to make sure I haven’t thrown up in the bowl, I can understand that this is probably no fun for her.
I wouldn’t bother Farah with any of this if they’d let me go to the bathroom by myself. But rules are rules.
I already know I'm not going to be anybody's favorite patient at the old folks' home; a situation like this would make me absolutely lose it. Yes, personal autonomy vs. being herded together and controlled is not to be taken for granted. Yet many people don't know what to do with themselves if they're not in a controlled herd of some sort (maybe short of having to beg for access to the restroom).
oh gosh poor Farah