When the hurdles 'help'

So this blog post was not intended to be the in my journey to recovery, but bad, unplanned things happen and sometimes they help, sometimes they make things worse. My intention was to explain my journey so far, and my first two blog posts cover my journey until November 2015, but for this post, I am just going to jump ahead in time, to yesterday.

Yesterday, after two great days in Edinburgh, Scotland, where I visited a friend from High School, I returned home. My mum called me and said that she was about to head off to the vet with one of my two cats. I've had my cats since I was 11 and they're a big part of my family. One of them, Mouse (there's a long story behind that name), was throwing up, had stopped eating and was just skin and bone. I told my mum not to let the vet put her down, because if she needed to be put down, I wanted to fly home first to say bye.

An hour later my mum called me. She was crying. Mouse had kidney failure, and it would have been cruel to keep her alive any longer. So I spent yesterday afternoon crying.

Mouse, when she was fit and healthy

Why am I telling you this? Well, one thing that was particularly tough to hear was that my mum said "I'm glad you didn't get to see what Mouse looked like. She was just skin and bones, she wouldn't speak to anyone and just hid in dark spaces on her own. She could barely walk up and down the stairs. I'd rather you remember her as a healthy, loving and social cat". My mum doesn't know that I'm being treated for anorexia, and she hasn't seen me since mid-January. Since then I've lost about 3.5 kg, and before then she was already worried about my weight. But I'd told her that it was because of the Crohn's, and that the doctors had an eye on me, so she calmed down. But she would be so upset if she saw me now. I've started cancelling some of my social plans that involve eating, I'm weak and tired - I'm not myself. I promised myself that I wouldn't let the anorexia get so bad that it hindered my social life, but it has creeped up on me, and I've started to cancel more and more plans with friends.

Hearing how she talked about Mouse and how upset she was made me realise, that I need to work harder to get out of anorexia. So yesterday, for the first time in I-can't-remember, I decided to eat the number of calories a normal person my size should eat in a day. It was tough, and for the first time I googled how to make myself purge - another thing I'd promised myself not to do, as I don't want to damage my teeth. But I stopped myself, and I kept all the food in me. A success, I guess. But today I feel awful, and I will be restricting my calorie intake severely once again. Constant ups and downs.

As mentioned, this blog post was not planned. In the upcoming post, I will write about how my anorexia was discovered, the consequences of my anorexia, how my treatment sessions are and, hopefully, I can convince myself to post a picture of myself - without my face - so you can get a better understanding of where I am. Thanks for reading.