Despite the fact that I don’t often leave home - I work from here, and it’s been bitterly cold lately - I’ve managed to come down with something. While I’m trying to go through the motions of life as usual, it’s just kinda. . . It’s just not happening.
Sleep is disrupted. My appetite is fried (which is to say, completely absent). I’m drawn to decongestants, but they mess with me ever since my last major relapse when I decided to see whether or not diet pills would help - incidentally, for anyone who hasn’t taken that route who might be thinking similar things, I quickly discovered that, no, they didn’t.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah: being sick always weirds me out and skews my sense of my own eating disorder recovery.
Take now for instance. I’m so not a morning person, but here it is, 5:30 (on a Saturday, no less) posting to my blog. I wasn’t exactly able to sleep, the coughing jags kept waking me up (despite the fact that I had taken Nyquil which promises the best sleep I’ve ever had with a cold but didn’t come through) as did my complete inability to breathe. My body temperature is completely dis-regulated. And I’m whining. It makes me feel little kid pathetic, and that tends to make me push people away (even the nice ones).
January 31st, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Even though it’s been many years since I was actively anorexic, getting sick always makes me think about the times when I would ENJOY the flu because it meant losing pounds, inches, whatever. So I can completely understand what you’re saying.
January 31st, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Exactly, and it’s a mighty strange thing. I sometimes suspect that nothing showcases how disrupted the thinking patterns of an anorexic can be like the satisfaction of getting sick.
I haven’t really been struggling with the disease for a few years now, but every time it reminds me…