My eating disorder: part 5

When I got home from summer camp, my eating disorder was full blown. My best friend's mom noticed something was wrong with me and she approached me and asked if I had been making myself sick. I admitted to her that I was struggling with binging and purging, and I went to the doctor.
After a few weeks living with my best friend, my friend's mom convinced my parents to send me back to the behavioral school. I wanted to be back with my social worker, C. I felt she cared about me. I was very wrong.

I started back at the behavioral school with C and we started doing intensive family therapy. There were a series of bad family sessions, that lasted hours, and ended in everyone yelling and crying and my father and C in each others' faces. It was really ugly. I told my parents, for the first time, about the abuse from when I was a child and they told me I was a liar, they did not believe me. I fell apart. I had finally shared something horrible, a secret I'd kept for years, and the response was anger. Home was screaming and slamming doors, me calling C and begging for help. All the while I was binging and purging throughout the day, and especially in the middle of the night.

After a series of horrible family sessions, C decided to pull me out of my parents' house. I moved out of the house and then lived with a number of families who were willing to take me in. All the while, my eating disorder go out of control. I was binging and purging for hours in the evening on any food I could find, I was purging while at school even. I was spending the little money I had on food to binge, and even started to steal from our local grocery store. I went through ice cream and pastries and milkshakes and fries... my car smelled like fast food.... I had no money.... I had so many secrets, I was dizzy and tired and still had to run and swim miles at school. Nobody knew my secret.

Many things happened in the year that I was out of my parents' house. C became very sick and lost lots of weight, and would weigh herself in front of me to prove how small she was. She brought me into her life and manipulated me into being loyal to her. I started abusing laxatives and enemas. At one point I overdosed on diet pills and almost had a heart attack. I was so sick. Purging became second nature to me, and sneakiness was the only thing I knew how to do well. I stopped singing, stopped going to our temple, I was terrified of running into my parents.

I was 17 when I started fainting and passing out running, and a drove myself to children's hospital. They admitted me, not at my lowest weight, but sick enough to need an IV and feeding tube for two weeks. I sat in the hospital alone for two weeks. C called to scream at me, tell me how f-d up I was, how I'd betrayed her, how I was sick and messed up. It was a horrible couple of weeks.

I got out of the hospital with nowhere to live. I continued to purge, even though I knew I was putting my life in danger. It was just a few weeks later that I left home and flew to New Orleans to live with my grandma. I had nobody else to live with. It was the only chance I had to survive. I had to LEAVE, get away. And I did.