Michael Somers's Blog, page 2

Chapter 2: The World Outside

Okay, so I ate my breakfast with no problem at all. I even drank the milk from the bowl after I ate the Raisin Bran and nearly choked on some of the bran bits left over, but that could happen to anyone. The important thing is I ate the cereal, drank the milk, stirred in the jam-like strawberries into the cottage cheese tub, and ate that, too, scraping my spoon into the corners of the tub to get as many of the curds as I could. All washed down with the Maxwell House. All with no problems or issues.

For being the first meal totally on my own as a free man, not bad at all. I could do this.

In the hospital, there was an hour of time where we sat, just digesting our food and dealing with whatever emotions eating brought up for us. The thing is, sit time is when we all sit together with a nurse, and here I am, all by myself, no one to share it with. Guess I’ve been conditioned and socialized too well with the sit time. It feels wrong to be here alone, and I don’t have any negative or bad feelings about eating; I was hungry and I was glad to eat. I don’t feel any compulsion to run to the bathroom and puke it all back up, and I’m glad for that, too, because puking up something like Raisin Bran is really painful, considering all the jagged edges and when they scrape up against your throat or get stuck there, it hurts like a mother hummer. There was a time not too long ago where the toilet bowl and I would be a first name basis, and have quite an intimate relationship going on, but now, we’re solidly in the break-up phase, and I hope we never enter the make-up phase.

So barring any complications or negative feelings, I wasn’t sure what to do. I felt like I should do some form of sit time, just to keep that part of my rituals consistent. I wouldn’t be sitting around analyzing or talking about my feelings or anything like that. I was glad I didn’t have to, and glad to not hear Brandy and Holly go through all their usual after-meal dramas. Talk about tiresome.

Then I remembered that when I’ve stayed at hotels with Mom and Dad before there was usually a newspaper left outside the door in the mornings. I opened the door and sure enough, a USA Today weekend edition greeted me. I snatched it up off the floor and shut and lock the door again before I see anyone, or have anyone see me. I loved the whole being-by-myself thing right now. It felt nice to not deal with anyone for a change, and not to have every move I make monitored, evaluated, judged.

I opened the heavy curtains to the gray and cloudy day outside, and plopped into the easy chair by the window, hooking the ottoman with my feet and sliding it closer so I can put my feet up. I realized I should shower, but that could wait until I read the paper.

I hadn’t read a newspaper in months. We weren’t allowed to read them on the unit, and we weren’t allowed to read any magazines, either. Television was something else we didn’t have access to, except for when the nurses said we could, and even then, that was tightly controlled. Talk about your Orwell scenarios. Big Brother was always watching, always controlling, all knowing and all-powerful. We could read books, but that was only if the nurses approved of them and their content.

But I knew why they controlled things so much. The magazines and television thing I could totally understand, because of the whole skinny models and actresses, and diet tips and how to snag a man, and whatnot. I didn’t think skinny models and actresses made anyone anorexic, but I can see where their presence on an eating disorder unit wouldn’t be such a good idea. Ditto the diet tips and snagging a man tips.

Newspapers I didn’t understand. Dad brought home the newspaper every day, and I’d read it every day. I liked knowing what’s going on in the world. I wasn’t, and am still not, one of those dumb, narrow-minded teenagers who think that the only thing that possibly matters is what they consider to be important, or whatever text message flashes across their cell phones, usually something stupid like “what u doin” or “im bored.” Yes, that’s so much more important than people being killed in a war, or an earthquake knocking a whole Chinese village to the ground, or whether Iran or North Korea is developing nukes or not. It’s morons like that that give us teenagers with an actual brainwave a bad name.

Because it’s been months since I’ve read a newspaper, the headlines and happenings were foreign to me. I’ve missed a lot of what’s going on in the world, but as I read the stories about how the war was going (better than I last knew) and what was new with the economy (worse than I last knew), I quickly got up to speed and felt a bit more connected to the something other than myself and my own feelings and thoughts.

I catch wind of myself as I fold the paper all nice and neat, and place it on the floor. I smell ripe. Time to chip the funk off. Shower, here I come.

Chapter 1, Conclusion: Good Morning, Sweet Freedom!

The coffee maker does its last hiccup and sputter, and I pour my first real cup of coffee in months. I decide not to doctor it at all. I blow on it, then take a sip. It scalds as it drains down my throat, but I immediately go back for another sip. Nasty as Maxwell House is, it’s good to have honest to goodness real coffee for a change instead of the decaf swill they served on 8-D. In fact, I saw a coffee shop down the street yesterday. I’ll make a note to go there this weekend.

Looking out on my suite from the kitchenette, I can’t help feeling lucky. I tell you, that hospital sure knows how to set a recovering bulimirexic up. I know I’m only here temporarily until they find a family for me to stay with, but still. I’m not in any hurry.

I glance at my alarm clock. It’s 7:50, ten minutes until 8, which is when I normally eat breakfast. Well, it’s when I’ve been conditioned to eat breakfast. Do I wait the ten minutes, just to keep on schedule? Or do I eat now? On 8-D, I had no choice. Eight was eight, and eight was when you started eating, not any second or nano-second before. Rigid. Structured. Military precision. There’s a big part of me that says to wait, to sit down at the little round table, drinking  my coffee and biding my time. Maybe open the curtains before I do so I can see what the world outside the hotel is up to. Judging from the light, it’s a gray morning, overcast, possibly rainy. It’s not a bright light pushing against the curtains at all, but dull, weak.

There’s no nurse to tell me to wait until 8. I’m not in the hospital anymore. I did write down a timeline for the weekend before I left the hospital yesterday. I wrote down breakfast at 8, and lunch at noon, and dinner at 5:30 and snack at 8:45. I wrote down the schedule that I knew, the schedule I’ve come to rely on. It’s okay if I eat breakfast a little before 8. No one’s going to wag their finger at me. And besides, I’m an emancipated minor now. I’m a big boy.

There’s no nurse to tell me not to go to my mini-fridge and get out the 2% milk, or to tell me not to get down the Raisin Bran from the cupboard, or not to fill a bowl with the Raisin Bran. Breakfast is one Protein, two Grains, two Fruit, one Satiety, and one Calcium. The Raisin Bran fills the two Grains and one Fruit, and with the milk, I can easily get one Calcium and the one Satiety. I grab an individual-sized cottage cheese tub, the kind with a compartment for jam-like strawberries to mix in, so there’s one Protein and one Fruit. All right. I’m all set. Not too hard. Pretty easy, pretty doable.

There’s no nurse to tell me, “You can do this, Nate!”  I can tell myself that. I can tell myself that because it’s true. It’s five minutes to eight, and I’ve got myself one breakfast spread the nurses on 8-D would be proud of. I can do this. I can pull this off.

Good morning, sweet freedom! Now, let’s dig in and get on with our day, shall we?

Chapter 1: Good Morning, Sweet Freedom!

I’m curled up in a wad of sheets and comforter in the middle of the bed when the alarm makes its jabbing, stabbing Psycho -shower-scene noise, killing whatever peaceful slumber I had.

I pull my head out from under the cocoon of sheets and squint my eyes to the night table beside the bed. It’s 7:30. It’s Saturday morning. Light is softly pushing against the curtains. Noise from the street, cars and the occasional honking horn, filters its way into the room. It’s like being in the hospital on 8-D, only it’s not. The light’s the same, the noise is the same, the institutional blandness of this hotel room is the same. Only it’s very, very different.

This morning I don’t have any nurses poking their heads into my room at 7:30 to make sure I’m actually up and out of bed because I need to be weighed by 7:45 before breakfast starts at 8. I don’t have any nurses telling me to hit the snooze on the alarm clock, because I was really good at just letting it buzz and buzz to irritate everyone. This morning, though, I reach my hand out and fumble to turn the thing off.

There’s no nurse standing outside the door of the bathroom to hear me pee, to make sure all I do is pee. I may have been bulimirexic but I used common sense. If you haven’t eaten anything in the last ten hours, what on earth could there possibly be to throw up except gastric juices? All that does is burn your throat like battery acid, and if you’re going to burn your throat like that with puking, you may as well eat some Doritos or chili-cheese Fritos and wash it down with Diet Dr. Pepper first. I mean, seriously.

There’s no nurse to tell me I can’t drink caffeinated coffee, so when I see the coffee pot, I fill the carafe with water and put the filter in the hopper, and turn it on after I wash my hands. Before long, I hear the water suck through the tube and into the hopper, making those little click and chick noises. I hear the hiss of the heating plate warm up, burning off whatever water I had gotten on the bottom of the carafe. I close my eyes and breathe in the heady steam. I had read somewhere that coffee steam carries anti-oxidants, so look at me being all healthy on my first day of freedom before I’ve even taken my first bite of breakfast.

There’s no nurse to lead me to a scale and weigh me, either. I look around the bathroom and there’s no scale here. I root through the room’s closet and look under the dresser, but no scale. No scale. No morning weigh in. No magic number to tell me how I’m doing, to gauge my progress, to decide if I need to have my daily calories increased, to dictate whether I can or can’t leave the unit, to command what privileges I can and can’t have. It feels weird not to step on a scale, but deep in my gut I know I’m still the same 146 pounds I was yesterday morning. That might change once I poop, but either way, it’s not terribly important to know the magic number. Not like it used to be.

There’s no nurse to lead me to the unit’s dining room area and show me which table my tray is on. There’s no kitchen worker to cook my meal up, plate it, slap it on a tray, and send it up to me, either. It’s up to me this morning. The hotel has a continental breakfast bar, which means pastry after pastry, cereal, fresh fruit that’s been sitting out for God knows how long, canned fruit that’s drowning in full sugar syrup, and an assortment of boxed cereal. I was sent to this hotel with two hundred dollars and bags full of groceries – nuts, dried fruits, yogurt containers, grapes, cereals, milk, cheese slices, lunchmeat, wheat bread, V-8 juice, apple juice, boxes of microwave mac and cheese, and other things. So I didn’t have to worry about going to wherever the continental breakfast bar was. I didn’t have to worry about making those kinds of food choices in a room full of strangers who most likely wouldn’t care about me, anyway.

To Be Continued…

Welcome to THE WEEKEND BETWEEN!

One of the most meaningful experiences of my professional life has been the publication of my debut novel STARVED.

Seeing the book become reality was meaningful in its own right, but even more so has been the response of readers to Nathan’s story of descending into, and learning to recover from, eating disorders.

THE WEEKEND BETWEEN picks up where STARVED left off and will end before Nathan begins his partial hospitalization program.  If you’ve read the book and wondered what happens next for Nathan, this blogged book will start to answer that question!

Please read the About section to learn more.

Comments and questions are welcome!

-Michael Somers