A Note From the Management

After an online friend lamented the lack of boob shots that she felt my "18 and Over" warning promised, I thought I'd better explain.

Although this blog and the links provided are appropriate (and necessary) for some younger viewers/readers, I wanted to convey that some of the situations/events narrated within deal graphically with "R"-rated matter- sex, drugs, death, serious mental illness, and- occasionally- even POLITICS. (By their very nature most of my posts touch on something-or-other political, but it's the "Dear Obama"-type crap that merits a warning).

Speaking frankly, as I am often too apt to do, age is not a defining characteristic of my target readership. There are people in their 60's who may never have the stomach for my subject matter. Some of us never quite grow comfortable enough to chat casually about sex, there is certainly a large contingent of those lacking any sense of humor about mental illness, and there are more unfortunate souls walking the earth who cannot forgive themselves for their past transgressions, nor can they forgive their transgressors.

Those whose view of the sanctuary is terminally obstructed by visions of sin will have to seek truth elsewhere.

For the remainder, I invite you to debate/ suggest/ just check in and PAY ATTN TO ME as we all work towards becoming our own best selves. And stumble. And push on.

Urban Survival for Complete Imbeciles

First and Foremost! I want to disclaim that the situation you are about to read (about?) is not my fault. The place had shitty plumbing when I moved in- generally taking 3-4 flushes to quaff a modest amount of toilet paper. I never challenged it with female products, I quit feeding it paper towels long ago, and eventually put it on the "paperless diet". It's gotten to the point where I'm happy to see it even dilute my urine in a single flush. At any rate, now that we've clarified who the victim is here. . .

Never, ever, ever assume that all brands of drain opener are the same and thoroughly compatible. Apparently, while one major brand is made of hydrochloric acid (which begs the question of what use it is in declogging a major case of bulimic toilet), others are made out of sodium hypochlorite. Which may be a base, or it may actually be the same thing in colloquial chemistry-speak. Yeah, I don't know.

All I know is that I'm so paranoid about accidentally creating a chemical bomb that I hadn't dranoed my bathtub in a year fearing the implications of hydrochloric acid mixing with any lingering molecules of dried on clean shower spray, or- god forbid- soap scum.

I finally got around to tackling my own stagnant drains when I found myself still standing in yellow water at the end of my shower and several weeks after I quit my first-world habit of trying to flush toilet paper down the loo. Hell, I even tried limiting my butter consumption It seemed to alleviate the issue to some degree, but frankly I feel that the goodness of real butter cannot be measured in plumber's labor hours.

Since I became semi-obsessed with household accidents (and germ transmission) a year or so ago, I had no fewer than three 1/2 to 7/8 used jugs of "U-bend Blaster," "Theta Pi Omega's Party Punch Concentrate" and "Facelift Strength Formula". As I recall, I used one in the shower and the content of the other two in the toilet. I must have lucked out and used the two compatible chemicals in the toilet.

Unfortunately, they didn't work. The water was still foamy with caustic goodness after many, many flushes and the dumping of much hot water. Eventually I had to break the cardinal rule against plunging a pipe full of caustic chemicals. I had to, though- see, I really had to pee and I didn't know how my sweet kidney juice would interact with the remaining drain-opening bubbles.

Unfortunately, this really has not resolved my problem. True, I can once more pee in the shower, but that's not always feasible. I don't think I can quite bring myself to defecate in the bathtub. Perhaps that should go directly into the plastic TP bag.

OR MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, MY LANDLORDS COULD REPLACE MY TOILET

On the way to the forum. . .

In my haste to grab anything sweet from the snacky-items aisle at the Asian grocery this weekend, I snapped up something that falls inexplicably under the category of "Only a Native Would Love. . ."

In my defense, there's got to be some way to impress on the importers that the semantic breadth of the American English cookie is not great enough to accommodate "shrimp powder" among its ingredients. Science marches forward?

Meanwhile, I'm stuck with a fairly large bag of "cookies" that taste distinctly like something one puts baking soda in the fridge to prevent.

Winter Cometh

Severe wind conditions today. 50mph is really fast for air to travel. Especially when it doesn't have a ton of water or dust to create drag. I was very much afraid it would rip my car door off or slam the trunk shut and decapitate me while I was half in it. I was trying to prioritize my groceries in order of freezer durability with only one free hand at a time, switching off the clown mitten as quickly as possible after the glove-only hand reached a "flash-freeze" state and quit functioning entirely. Fortunately today's haul included a sizeable proportion of dry goods safe to leave in the tundra while I focused my immediate attention on dairy, bottles of condiments, and approximately 10,000 cans. It would, however, have been mighty inefficient to succeed at the sorting-juggling game had I inadvertently failed to prioritize my head and left it for later retrieval with the baking mixes and crate of boxed stuffing.

More adventures from the Mcfabulous state hospital

Amy was beautiful and always gave away her arrival with the forcefield of urine-stench that warded off predators for a good solid 6-8-foot radius. Those rank molecules were not contained solely by the black duster she wore day in and day out, nor in the white blouse that she never changed- not even in the elegant long black pin-around skirt that fortnightly alternated with the denim miniskirt, for the odor continued to penetrate the miserable air even in the showers.

Of two things I was certain: one- that Amy had been seriously overmedicated at some point, leaving her shapely legs unable to adapt a normal standing pose, and two- that there was more to Amy than met the eye.

Carrying a perma-stench was a grevous sin, unlike- for instance- shitting your pants. Sure, one might stew for half and hour or so during shift change, but shit was an inherently temporary state. With shit, eventually, depending on your perceived level of competence, someone would either come along and clean you up or berate you until you cleaned up after yourself. With urine, eventually, stuff dried.

By affirming my vegetarian diet somewhere in the shuffle of intake paperwork, I’d foolishly assumed that I had kosher in the bag. So comfortable and homey was the system that I didn’t even know from which end to begin my rant when the day came that my tray came out with a sticker on the side reading “BEGONIAS- VEGETARIAN” and bearing a steaming fried catfish filet.

Such are the times that testify to the utility of the trays being served by through a slit in a steel door, visual contact between patients and food first being made through Plexiglas and (if the tech is so kind) drawn blinds), requests for condiments being heard (or not) through a hole drilled through. Presumably, there was some rhyme or reason behind the restrictions placed on the number and variety of condiment packets issued each patient: the mind reels at the possibilities: Secret hallucinogenic properties of a sugar rush acquired from the consumption of greater than four packets of sugar in a single sitting? A magical midnight feast drawn together of mixed jelly, mustard, aspartame, and pepper? Generally the reasons behind condiment rationing weren’t so exciting: most often, they were simply out of stock. Occasionally, the serving tech would deem the requested condiments inappropriate for meal congruence and deny them on a whim.

Sometimes, they would decline to serve an entire meal to a patient whose behavior was, in their opinion, not suited to the kitchen on a unit of a high-security state mental hospital.

A *real* Bipolar Life

. . .not descriptive my moods nearly as distinctively as my life. It takes a year or two for my depressive episodes to successfully mentally castrate me.

For instance, I became pretty gung-ho about suicide at the ripe old age of 9. Or maybe I was 8? What I know for sure is that I was in the fourth grade. So commenced my long, boring, often worthless/ detrimental life in therapy. However, it wasn't until the 6th grade that I opted to trade off leisure time and my brain-mouth filter for passing grades and freedom from the tyrannies of detention.

5 years after that I quit high school and, over the 7 years to follow, spent my time essentially being a winner at life. I travelled around the US and to the opposite end of the Earth. I followed the Grateful Dead (the *real* Dead) I travelled the Russian countryside "riding the dog" (Russian colloquialism for taking the train without buying a ticket.) I dyed my hair blue, red, pink, and purple and taught college classes without considering removing my nosering. I won over 20,000 dollars in grants, largely for the express purpose of going to study in countries known for hard drinking. I met a fabulous girl and married her.

Unfortunately, in my 2nd year of grad school I was socked in the belly by the most ruthless depression I had, till then, experienced. My concentration was so poor that, not only could not read for awhile, but I couldn''t even sustain attention long enough to make it through a sitcom anymore. I also lost a huge chunk of my appetite; I probably averaged a couple hundred calories a day for about 3 weeks. Oddly enough, I didn't notice that I was getting malnourished until one night in bed I discovered my cervical vertabrae. At the time, I also noted how much money I hadn't spent on groceries.

Of course, cash flow from starving myself ended very shortly. I relapsed with my bulimia in all its former glory. I was genuinely aurprised and secretly proud when I was diagnosed with Anorexia a few months later. I mean, I knew that I could puke my way thin, but this was the first I'd heard my 100,000-calories-per-day habit included in the criteria for AN.

While its true that earned my M.A. that year, and, two years later, was awarded my second FLAS fellowship to spend a year drinking in Poland, I never recovered totally mentally/physically and certainly not intellectually. My flame had burned out, and I slogged my way through the fifth year. Unfortunately, 5th year is when your committee and your advisor seem to expect brilliant ideas to actually be developed and ardent copyediting of every last draft. The ten=day long exam sounds like it would suck, as well. I started getting occasional Cs, whereas in my first term I'd actually cried about A minuses. I always felt like a mental midget in graduate school after maintaining a 4.0 GPA (in my field only) through my BA. While my specialty isn't large enough to be considered a big pond, I did feel that I'd gone from big fish/small pond to small fish/small pond.

It's pretty much been upstream in cold waters since then. I've gradually lost interest/ability in everything that once made me at least minimally sociable and lucky enough to have varying regular opportunities to appreciate singlehood (from taking exstacy to going dancing at the S&M club, to taking random jobs- some under the counter- and leaving them on a whim and dying my hair to clash with my mostly Goodwill couture). My friends were family to me and our fundamental duty to one another was to let the good times roll. Having to quit graduate school did a number on my self-esteem & my work ethic. When I thought nothing could be any worse, 2004 really was spectacularly bad, especially exogenously. (Nearly had my foot amputated, the last year of my 20s, an awful president was elected for the first time to a second term, my wife left me.) 2005 sucked me dry and spit me into the wind as I dealt with the end of my marriage by honestly applying myself to suicide. I just went round-and-round the drain of my own misery, pulling anyone who tried to care about me in to drown, too. To top it off, my eating disorder- which is now old enough to drink, BTW- has managed to mature into its most feral and extreme depths in the past 4 years.

I would really like to grow out of this stage, but I honestly believe that 34 may be too late for me to accomplish a life worth writing about, not to mention worth reading about.

(If you actually managed to read this thing, kudos! Leave a comment so I can single you out on tEEf)

The Moss is Always Greener on the Other Side of the Stump

Tomorrow I have an appointment with the shrink who's covering my new shrink at the formerly-off-limits OP Psychiatry Department of the "better" medical center in town. I like this guy- he treated me when I was on the psych ward (local) last week. He confirmed/ reaffirmed my diagnosis as M.D.D., discontinued my "mood stabilizers", and started me on an ass-kicking new anti-depressant. It seems to be working- almost too well. I was bordering on hypomanic this weekend. But I think I just need to adapt to it. Generally my initial response to anti-Ds (that go on to actually be effective) is a couple weeks of definitive activation syndrome.

I seriously need some Ativan. I promised myself that I would do my best to adhere to Doctors' Orders with this new opportunity. The doctors and other staff of this medical center actually have some experience with Eating Disorders, which has apparently eluded the shrinks at the county mental health center despite their many years of practice and (presumably) hundreds- no, make that thousands, of patients treated.

Dr. Covering New Guy offered to get me in to see a therapist who does EDs. I conceded. Most of my experience in therapy has been regressive and clumsy at best, downright traumatizing at the other end of the spectrum. Perhaps every 12th one was moderately helpful. It's hard to treat an eating disorder on the back of the Federal Poverty and Disability Insurance. It's simply not covered. So I definitely owe myself a trial with an actual referred therapist. It probably won't kill me.

It might even make me stronger. My side of the tree stump still looks greener, despite what I expected before going around it.

I am the ultimate asshole

Nothing poetic about it- I am scum of the earth and, ultimately, show loyalty and love only to my twisted compulsions.

I had some hope today- an appointment with a shrink experienced in eating disorders. I promised myself and all who would listen that I was going to do my damnedest to let him lead me and give all doctor's orders a silent but fair trial. Because clearly, I fail utterly and completely at taking charge of my own life. I was prepared to try medications that turn me into a fat-swarthed, drooling, twitching captive. I was expecting to be ordered back into therapy. I psyched myself out to be brainwashed by the 12 steps. I was expecting to be admitted to rehab or an EDU. I was hoping that he would perform some kind of magic to get me charity aid, as centers that actually treat both EDs and other addictions concurrently as few and far between, and none are covered by my state Medicaid.

Unfortunately, nobody bothered to note down that I was given an appointment today- instead they some assigned me the 30th of October. "If I make it that long," I wanted to mutter under my breath, but the reality is far too graphic and dire to diminish with a pathological passive-aggresive reply. I feel like another chunk of me dies every day and I am sick and tired and I will probably have to abruptly stop taking the anti-convulant prescribed to me because I don't have enough refills to last another month-and-a-half.

I just wish I had some goddamn ativan. And some sort of effective sleeping aid. If I could sleep until the date of that appointment, it would at least slow down the deterioration of all of me.

I wish I was a decent human being.

In which I manage to stay out of the hospital for an entire month. . .

. . .Only to reemerge with a double-booking- admitted to the local psych floor not 2 weeks before being reunited with my much-maligned regional state hospital for the third time this summer.

I like to blame the latter on the former- I was discharged from the local ward on the second day of a total and abrupt restructuring of my crazy meds, scarcely enough time to pony up a life-threatening allergic reaction, let alone get all one's neurotransmitter receptors aligned and firing routinely on the same side. This was my first total med dump and fresh start in as long as I can remember. While I routinely discontinued my meds gradually in the days following a discharge, this d/c of my anti-depressant and anti-psychotic drugs had the unique characteristic of being thoroughly sanctioned by my prescribing physician. And please do note: I continued to take my shiny new rxes essentially as written through discharge and well back into my routine welcome-home flurry of self-destruction. I managed to spin myself into psychosis and the complementary OD on leftover anti-psychotic meds just fine on the trim new combo of oxcarbazepine and buspirone. Though I must confess that my latest delusional break was not the sharp departure from reality that customarily won me a free visit to the emergency department, and my accompanying OD was relatively trifling (a very large daily dose, really not even an overdose- though sufficient to cause partial seizures throughout my night on a heart monitor). Especially in light of the fact that I induced vomiting shortly after I began to feel the effects and called for my ride to the peanut farm not long thereafter.

I used the above as leverage for a swift and low-bullshit discharge from what turned out to be (at the time) a *remarkably* crazy bad unit of the state shithole. One night a patient decided to express his opinion regarding the shit on the unit by brandishing his colostomy bag and whipping it around the dining area and across the front desk counter. When staff denied him a replacement bag, he continued expressing himself directly onto the floor, leaving a trail as he traversed the hallways and two public TV rooms. The techs helpfully set up yellow >CAUTION! WET FLOOR!< signs around the major deposits and proceeded to ignore the human feces punctuating every major thoroughfare of the hall for a couple of hours, ostensibly in the hope that the patient have the shame? embarrassment? dignity? pity? to pick up his own shit after experiencing zero discomfort spreading it around to begin with. Such flights of fancy on staff's behalf only cost an evening's worth of major health code violation- not long enough for it to have any repercussions. And honestly, most of us sympathized with guy enough to tolerate the shitty protest for a couple of hours.
He possessed the intestinal fortitude to literalize what all of us coherent patients had mistaken for a only figurative retaliation against the unfairness of being confined to Monroe Hall. The colostomy patient shat for all of us that night.

It was particularly oppressive being female at a time when the patient population, for whatever reason, was 75% male.

'Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.'

O'Brien, 1984

This is How I am Going to Die

I am a bipolar iv drug addict and a bulimic and I am dying, but not from either of these things. I am dying of ignorance. I am dying of the pervasive, erroneous belief in the healthcare field that symptoms of mental illness are just desserts, an appropriate punishment for our failure to take care of ourselves properly.

Independent of (and prior to) my real downward spiral into lowlife junkie loserhood, I was denied medical referrals for various symptoms, which were brushed off as "probably a side effect of my weight (loss)," despite a clearly documented history of external pathologies to explain various nerve and joint issues.

As a bulimic, I should have regular labwork done to monitor my serum potassium levels. I should always have a current prescription for potassium caplets.

As an IV drug user, I fear phlebotomists. Especially trainees, who populate the lab at the clinic I used to go to. But I wasn't sure how justified I was in my fear and loathing until I wound up in the ER a couple of nights ago, after a hard couple of days with more hits than misses which resulted in me looking even more of a loser than usual.

They wouldn't listen to my advice. They wouldn't let me have any water- dehydration is awful for venipuncture and the color of my urine specimin made it clear that I was dehydrated. They refused to try veins I knew would work and left me with a nice 5 inch long hematoma on the inside of my forearm. 8th time's a charm?

Apparently, my potassium was 2.7. This is actually a record low for me. The psych floor apparently waffled about taking me but I suppose they remembered how charming I was from a few weeks prior. At any rate, I had faith that whoever was sent up from the lab to redraw me the next day would be better. The last time I'd been on this floor, I'd had labs done by a magician.

No such luck, though. It was a repeat of the night before. This woman refused to draw from my hand, saying literally "because we're supposed to draw from here" (she points to the crook of the elbow, the first veins to be blown by every needle jockey.) Then she tied my arm off until it turned purple, dug around with her needle with no luck, paused for a minute to go out for a smoke break, continued to gouge me until she finally hit a minor vein. She proceded to literally suction the blood out of me for a good minute.

Then she finally released the tourniquet.

This is an excellent way to create a falsely elevated serum potassium reading.


So, at any rate- I'm not going in for regular bloodwork. The odds of getting an angels are pretty damn slim. The odds of getting an asshole who thinks the abusing me is going to anything other than send me after something to block out the pain are pretty high.

And the odds of me being admitted to rehab with hypokalemia? Well, now. That's just downright funny.

The co-morbidity thread.

Anorexia is "worse" (better?) (superior, but with a darker prognosis) than bulimia. However, binging-purging anorexia has the highest mortality rate of all eating disorders. Er, of "both" eating disorders, neglected as compulsive over-eating is in the realm of research, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that COE is the deadliest of them all.

Bulimics of whatever weight, however, are more likely to present with/ acquire at taste for reality-adjustment. Is this taken into consideration when figuring morbidity/mortality rates of the messy binge/purgers vs. the pure ethereal restrictive anorexics? And what is the prognosis for those displaying symptoms of both eating disorders and substance abuse disorders?

Not too good, duh.

But doesn't one compulsion temper the other? Compulsion requires singular dedication to perfect. If one's attention is divided between spanking the monkey and gorging the gorilla, one can only slither so far down a particular rabbit hole before self-preservation ( of a sort) retrieves the self and sets it back down in the alternate whirlpool of self-destructive cerebral onanism.

Right?

. . . Something about how drugs that act on the dopamine receptors physiologically diminish willpower (as in the power to abstain when indulging is easier/more pleasurable)

Would-be to-do list

Sweep bathroom and kitchen at old apt, with use of force when necessary. (I pancreas a well-made scrubbrush. Pick up rubbish from carpeted areas by hands, catch the detritus with the bissell. Mop kitchen & bathroom floors. Scrub entirety of bathroom, floor, walls, commmode, underneath those places most people are lucky enough never to even acknowledge, let alone repeatedly apply caustic chemicals and liberal elbow grease to tamp down the level of nasty stench.

So I'll hit all the "bulimic arterial spatter" points as well, out of courtesy. You know what I'm talking about- those sprays that inadvertantly wind up 8 feet up on the wall behind you. And who hasn't experienced a rousing game of "what's that stuff stuck to the ceiling, and how on Earth did it get there?"

I need to absolutely sterilize this new place, though. I grow accustomed to the rank odor of cat piss after spending an hour or so back home, but the stench is magnified a gugelplex entering the bathroom.

I'm also meant to change my address with the post office, SSA, HFS, and- oh! unpack my own shit. God forbid. And I've decided, on my second night here, that my top household decoration priority will be drapes. Stringing up networks of scarves from Russia and the Far and Middle East has a certain kitschy charm, but it doesn't make it nighttime indoors whenever I need it to be. Further, the uneven nature of using random cloths (even if some are quite large) as window coverings is that they never*quite* fit, leaving totally unjest individual rays to hit exactly one third of the face.

More importantly, I think, is that such curtains leave such a wide opportunity for nosy sniveling snitching peepers. Mom's coming up this weekend, my freedom depending, and I would love toenable her shopping complex. (It's generally quite tempered by my stereotypical late-20th century American Jew genes.) If I had anything to contribute, I could almost say that we balance each other out. In actuality, we haven;t down much "recreational shopping" (yes, drs. do this) since I lost my TAship in 2003. And I guess I'm not as much fun to shop for, when my response to every item proferrred is "and what exactly does one do with that?"
I don't need five new pairs of shoes at a time

I will write more on how much I love my new neighbors later, but for the time being I think I'd better do my TaeBoe before another crisis comes up.

I don't feel good.
I am not happy.
It's not okay.
Everything is wrong.
I alone am not acceptable.

I don't even really want to eat. I just keep bingeing because that's the only way to remember who I am. Forget who I am. Without that protective barrier of cakecrumbs and puke between me and reality I will fall into the abyss. There's no oxygen and no light there.

The only places worse have the words "mental health" or "psychiatric" in their titles.

Encore of the Living Dead

Ahhhhhhhh! The first of the month, finally my foodstamps have been reupped. I am waging a losing battle to restrain myself from going out in public looking like a seriously hideous unwashed stinky food zombie and blowing a large chunk of them on things that make the self-righteous and uber-frugal go "tsk". But fuck them. I'm not ignorant white trash, goddamnit.

I know that it's imperative not to go grocery shopping hungry. *Honk if you get irony.*

Discuss amongst yourselves.

And now I proceed to reveal my face without my flesh

Yes I received your letter yesterday
About the time the doorknob broke.
When you asked me how I was doing-
was that some kind of joke?

Yes, it actually bothers me to be seeing a psychiatrist who believes my biggest struggle is "anorexia" (say this in your head in a sing-song voice,) then "depression". Yup, you got it. For the first time in as long as I can recall, I made it out of a quackologist's office with no Axis I complication of my affective disorder beyond "depression." Not even the vaguest attempt to force atypical anti-psychotics on me as treatment for my flaky skin, sleeplessness, flat affect, irritability, (inexplicably) depression and apathy, unresponsiveness, or anxiety. The doctor didn't even halfheartedly attempt to consider a lifetime of recurrent severe major depressive episodes as a cycle of some sort. Clearly, he had been kicked off of Seroquel's payroll¹. My last set of schizodiagnosticians had been in bed with the Abilify folks. Clearly, madly, passionate. In fact- I was threatened to be cut off altogether should I refused to ackowledge my "gradually emerging schizophrenia" and take Abilify (AAP # 5, IIRC. . . but anti-psychotics number 7.)

I refused.

And, for the time being. . . I refuse to continue. I'm filliing up everything Iwrite with non-sequitors this afternoon due to too many days with too little sleep. I also must now go to Wal-mart and return the crochet hoops, glittery spools of colored macrama twine, multiple feet of lovely, lovely trimming, a few feet or really ugly trimming (who needed blue leather braid on clothing? Why?). . . and odds and ends of fabric that I'd truly prefer not to. (all that fleece. . .chiffon, satin, corduroy. jeez, people!)

Maybe I'll pick up some actually embroidery thread at the actual hobby store as I was meant to on my way home. Gasp, shock, awe.

1.To be fair, I only later recalled reading of him drinking seroquel-flavored soup. But also in the name of honestly I must assert that he did not at all appear to be a risk at this point. Perhaps a company rep had dropped by just then to let him know how much she'd enjoyed her visits, but that she had to move and would never, ever, be coming back. The assorted caseful was sort of goodbye present. And the kids? That they had managed to escape icecream-flavored anti-psychotic soup is testiment to the patience that pink elaphant must possess to sit and wait years in the closet before emerging, and his unique traits that make him recignizabable even to the youngest of children who know that talking to invisible creatures is not worth free sweets.

Why It's Not Cool to Pick on Amy Winehouse or Other Living Creatures

"My point is that idolizing this woman or her body is ridiculous."

Your point in posting here was to underscore how ridiculous the participants are? Or to see just how many cleverly-worded chops on a sick woman's appearance you could come up with, sight unseen?

I don't get why you would be participating in a thread devoted to pictures of someone who you claim makes you vomit, has lost half her teeth,and "looks like a junky". Even more surprising is that you would belong to an entire forum populated by people who probably look very much the same, despite the status of their sobriety.

I do apologize for dragging this out. I just hate it when I see this kind of attitude perpetuated on our forum. As if there's some great barrier of sanity separating those with eating disorders from the rest of the mentally ill population that grants us some right to look down upon sufferers of other (or in this case, additional) disorders. Just as bad is our instant justification of any necessary degree of slander/censor in the name of anti/recovery Depending on the way the wind is blowing in any given season- your comments would surely never have seen the light of day on this board circa 2001, smothered by the "rule" of anti-recovery.

I'm not arguing with the sentiment- if you had voiced it so simply in the first place we wouldn't have wasted a page arguing veinous scar tissue. I agree that A.W. is unhealthy. It actually breaks my heart to read so many media forum posts stating that "celebrity X can't possibly weigh that much" when "that much"= 90 lbs.

I'm arguing with the semantics. Sick is sick. Sick is universally unhappy, systemically unhealthy, heartbreaking, and at least occasionally gross. A.W. is sick. I am sick. Most of our board members are sick.* I assume, despite your initial interactions with me in the bulimia forum last September, that you are also sick.
Sick hurts too much to shower and sick is too tired to brush teeth. Sick says too much after a another sleepless night. Sick is bloated at an eternal #2 on the kidney list. Sick is unhealing bedsores and infected ulcers of pre-amputated feet. Sick is hair and shit and tumor and bone and vomit- human waste, wastes removed, and wasted human lives. Sick is universally understood to be negative and we all know that idolizing sickness is "ridiculous."

Editorializing is unnecessary. '

*Although it's important to remember that many members deal with at least one major mental illness in addition to an ED, along with a sizeable number of members dealing with one or more chronic physical disabilities/disorders.