Before Admittance

To begin, a little background:  I am thirty years old.  I spent the month of August driving across the country with my mother (of all people) from Portland, OR to my childhood home in Northern Virginia, essentially leaving behind everything I held dear at the time:  my teaching job, my impossibly cute apartment in its impossibly cute surrounding neighborhood, and all my impossibly interesting city friends.  I actually thought my life was that good, and I really only expected it to get better.  Although I was leaving my awesome city life behind, I had plans to move to Thailand at the end of August (after a brief visit with my family – and I emphasis brief ) where I would plan my January wedding and live off my fiancé’s grant money (he has been funded by a very generous organization to study Thai language),meaning I would do nothing but pick out flowers, go to the gym, and get massages.

Needless to say, things did not go according to plan.  When I arrived at home, my family members seemed alarmed by how thin I had become.  I ran a marathon in December of 2009 and had not stopped running since.  This, coupled with my terrible eating habits, developed out of an insatiable desire to be the thinnest girl in the room, had finally taken its toll on my body.  When I stepped on the scale at home, I was alarmed to see that I had dropped to roughly 90 pounds, although I would never have admitted any of this to my family.   I loved to run, and it made me feel great, especially if I was hungry.  How could anybody who ran so much be unhealthy?  At any rate, somehow, after many hours of tearful urging, my family convinced me to get a routine blood panel at a local clinic.  I figured I could ask the doctor about the pain I had been having in my Achilles tendon, which was limiting my running distance, and get the stupid blood panel.  In retrospect, I was probably just a little concerned that my labs might reveal something bad.   Just a little.  Somewhere in the back of my mind.

A few days later, the doctor called me at 9 o’clock at night to inform me that I was severely anemic and could drop dead at any moment, which frankly, scared the shit out of me; it scared me enough, in fact, to tell my parents about the results, even though I knew that it might cause some level of over-reaction.  True to form, before I knew it, my parents had rushed me to the emergency room where I was admitted to the hospital for a blood transfusion.  It was in the hospital, after days of iron injections and tests to rule out internal bleeding, that I decided to seek treatment and delay my trip to Thailand, along with my wedding.  After a few days of research on my parents’ part, I ended up at Remuda Ranch in Wickenburg, Arizona, the Hilton of treatment centers, the kind of place where, according to their website, people recover from their eating disorders by doing yoga, riding horses, completing ropes courses, and praying a lot (okay, that one didn’t sound so good).  But I was in.  Sort of.

If you don't believe me, check out this website:  www.remudaranch.com/