Elena Vanishing (35 page)

I make it over to the hospital in time for shift change. Before walking into the post-surgical ward, I wash my hands for the first of many times today. Right thumb, left hand, rotate and rub. Left thumb, right hand, rotate and rub. Left wrist, right wrist, fingers down. Nursing is a great place for people who take comfort in little rituals.

“Student, I need help!” a nurse barks as soon as she sees me. “She's crashing. We have to get her down to ICU.”

A very tiny little old lady has just come through surgery, and her body isn't responding well at all. I help the nurse switch out her leads and tubes and put her on a gurney. Her weeping daughter hurries after us.

In the elevator, I stand by the head of the little old lady's gurney. The wrinkles around her eyes and mouth tell me that she laughs more than she frowns. She's conscious and in great pain, but she talks to me as formally and politely as if we are meeting for coffee.

“That's my daughter,” she says. “I have two girls and one boy. And I have five grandchildren.”

“You must be very proud of them,” I tell her with a smile. “Your daughter is beautiful.”

We get to the ICU floor, and the nurse goes off with her colleagues to get a bed prepared. The daughter steps away to call her family and tell them what the doctor said: that if they want to say good-bye, they'd better hurry.

The little old lady looks around vaguely. Her eyesight is going fast. I step up close beside her, and she reaches out to seize my hand, and when she touches me I know in every bone of my body that I love what I am doing right this minute more than I love anything else on earth.

“Are you going away?” she asks me anxiously. “I thought everyone was going away.”

I give her my other hand to hold. “I'm not going anywhere,” I say.

Her fading eyes find my face and see its smile, and she smiles back—just a hint of a smile, but it's enough.

There is a circle of stars hidden under the sleeve of my T-shirt, and stars are hidden in the sky above us, and the little old lady and I have met for the very first time at the crossroads of life and death.

“I don't want to be left alone,” she whispers. “Just please . . . just don't leave me alone.”

“I'm right here beside you,” I say.

There is a skull on my back. But there are also wings.

This book is an accurate description of how I have lived with my eating disorder. No part of it is intended to be a guide for how others should live. If you or someone you know has an eating disorder, please do not take any part of this book as a suggestion for how to handle your own journey to recovery.

Many of the things I chose to do were extremely dangerous. Purging, for instance, can kill without warning, and it can kill at any weight. It upsets the balance of electrolytes in the body and can cause cardiac arrest, seizures, or kidney failure. And some of the things the adults around me chose to do were equally dangerous. The contract that my parents made me sign, for instance, that tied my weight to a list of privileges, could have driven me to suicide instead of to treatment. Please do not take it or any of the other actions in this book as a model for how to handle an eating disorder.

If you or someone you love has an eating disorder, the one thing I will advise you to do is seek professional help. Do not try to manage an eating disorder on your own. Do not think that you can quietly share your life with anorexia. Anorexia will take it all.

Educate yourself with up-to-date information. Eating disorders are complicated, and the professionals are trying out new approaches all the time. In the years since my eating disorder began, I have seen
treatments and theories change radically. I recommend going to the websites run by the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) and the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders (ANAD). Their websites will help you find the latest resources available.

You may be wondering why I chose to write this book with my mother. The memoir was my idea. It took me years to talk my mother into helping me.

For years, I wanted this book more than I wanted anything else. The experience I was living through didn't match the experiences in the books I read. The memoirs I read either seemed to glorify eating disorders or seemed to focus only on the rosiest, most hopeful side of recovery. The truth as I lived it was more complicated than either of those two extremes.

Nothing about eating disorders is simple.

But I couldn't write this book on my own. Saying the words, describing details, remembering snippets, answering questions, even writing paragraphs . . . okay. But the thought of sitting in front of the keyboard for the entirety of the book from beginning to end, watching the words march onto the computer screen at a painfully slow, steady pace, immortalizing my indiscretions, failures, vulnerabilities, self-hatred, fears, and destruction in a series of cold, neutral Word documents—it would have been impossible.

It took me six and a half years to say I was raped. Not even to describe it. No, just to say the sentence took me six and a half years. Six and a half years, four schools, two countries, six therapists, three psychiatrists, two treatment centers, four hospitals, two thousand three hundred and seventy-two days, fifty-six thousand nine hundred and forty hours, three million four hundred and sixteen thousand four hundred minutes to say that sentence to my parents over the
phone and hang up. It took even longer to let other people discuss it in therapy. Longer still to say the hows and when and whys.

My mother allowed me to tell my story to her sporadically, skipping to different moments when things got too painful. I jumped around in my paragraphs and interviews, avoiding full descriptions, revealing key information in pieces, sometimes weeks or months apart. I could share a memory, and then, as soon as the words had tumbled from my mouth, I could seal it back into my vault. She had to place the pieces together, formulate the order, group the sentences, and make the story understandable and smooth flowing. She had to reread and rewrite the most painful parts of our lives for hours and hours and hours, down to the italics and exclamation points. Everything that influenced my decisions, she had to analyze. I would have given up the moment I saw the computer screen crawling with my pain.

What you have just read are my words, my descriptions, my feelings, my memories, my pain, my fears, my inside look at a world that has lost me many friends and that I have been judged for my entire adult life. This book is the purest, truest definition of those years and myself as I lived them. Without my mother, it would never have seen the light. It would still be racing violently through my head, waking me up every night, whispering softly in my ear, reminding me in spurts and flashes that my past still dictates my life and it will forever. I scooped it up and threw it out, and my mother took the bits and pieces and glued together the perfect picture of who I am.

photo credit: JOE DUNKLE

Elena Dunkle
spent her teenage years exploring the German countryside and considers Germany her second home. She was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa at the age of seventeen and has always wanted to shed a light on her experiences with this complicated and misunderstood disorder. Elena currently roams across America with her wonderful husband and her travel-size Chihuahua, Mimsy. This is her first book. Find out more about Elena at
www.elenadunkle.com
.

Clare B. Dunkle
is an award-winning author of seven acclaimed fantasy and science fiction novels, including The Hollow Kingdom Trilogy, the first book of which was a winner of the 2004 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children's Literature. A Texan (and former Texas librarian), Clare now lives in Germany, but travels often to the United States to see her family, especially her two daughters, Valerie and Elena, and her grandchildren. Find out more about Clare at
www.claredunkle.com
.

Also available:
Hope and Other Luxuries: A Mother's Life with a Daughter's Anorexia
,
by Clare B. Dunkle

Jacket photo © by bonchan for Shutterstock.
Jacket design by Jennifer Tolo Pierce.

www.chroniclebooks.com/clareandelena