Did you know that I used to be anorexic or that I was hospitalized for it in the 12th grade? No? Me neither, but apparently that's the story that my father has been telling everyone lately. Nice, huh? Add this post to the category of Things I Didn't Bite My Tongue About a.k.a. Things I Chewed Someone Out About in the Middle of an IHOP Restaurant.
So how did I find out my father decided to rewrite history and make me into the poor, underfed heroine in an after school special? I started paying attention to Step Skank's snarky comments. Usually I tune the woman out or just ignore her altogether, but after the hundredth time I heard her say, "Well, if Chandler doesn't start eating, he's going to end up in the hospital just like you," I decided to do something about it.
Before any of you get too concerned, Chandler isn't anorexic either. He is just a picky eater. He likes what he likes, and doesn't like what he doesn't like. It's that simple. However, Step Skank seems to think that, if what Chandler eats doesn't come from a cow or pig or isn't deep fried, it isn't really food. In other words, if he eats chicken, fruit, and yogurt, then he has to be anorexic. If he eats red meat, then he's a growing boy. Some logic, huh?
As for me, I have never had an eating disorder. What I did have--the thing that landed me in the hospital in the 12th grade--was pseudomembranous or antibiotic-associated colitis. To put the condition in the simplest of terms, pseudomembranous colitis occurs when you take an antibiotic, usually of the broad-spectrum variety, and the antibiotic, instead of killing off the bad bacteria in your body like it's supposed to, kills off the good bacteria instead. The bad bacteria then takes over and eats away at your colon, bit by bit. If the doctors catch it in time, they can treat the condition with vancomycin. If they don't, then it's goodbye colon, and you spend the rest of your life crapping into what amounts to a Ziploc bag on your side.
Luckily for me, the doctors went the vancomycin route and left my colon right where it should be. Nevertheless, I spent six long weeks in the hospital for that condition and that condition alone. Did I loose weight while I was there? Well, yeah. The only way the colon can heal itself is to shed its damaged lining, and the only way it can shed its damaged lining is to send said lining down the remainder of the digestive tract in the form of--you can all cringe now--diarrhea. Who wouldn't lose weight after six weeks of the runs?
Did I have a feeding tube at one point? Again yeah. After all, it's a little hard to eat solid food when you have a tube in your throat breathing for you for four of those six weeks. I had to get nutrients somehow.
But was I anorexic? No, no, and no. But I guess anorexia makes a better story than your daughter crapped herself for six weeks so that's what my father is telling everyone 15 years later. Like I don't have enough to deal with right now.
Anyway, once I finally figured out that anorexia was what Step Skank had been implying, I let her and my father have it. I didn't care if we were in public. I was tired of the two insinuating that my mother didn't feed me or I didn't feed myself. Heck, if my father had ever bothered to take an active part in my life back then, he might have realized that I ate all the time; I just had a high enough metabolism that I didn't gain 500 pounds from it. As for my mother not feeding me--in trying to defend himself, he claims my official diagnosis was malnourishment, as if--what a joke. She was the only one who did, and without any help from him or his rarely paid child support, I might add.
Well, poor little Step Mommy couldn't take it and left the restaurant. My father, meanwhile, kept insisting that my hospitalization had nothing to do with an antibiotic and everything to do with my eating habits or lack thereof. He swears right and left that Dr. Wolfe, my gastroenterologist, told him that was what was wrong with me. Seriously, a gastroenterologist told him that? Why would a gastroenterologist even be involved with an eating disorder case? And why would said gastroenterologist prescribe vancomycin for that eating disorder? Or do two different colonoscopies? I wouldn't think any of those things were the norm in the treatment of anorexia.
But try telling my father that. Try telling him anything logical period. I think he lacks the brain cells needed for logic to compute because he didn't hear me. He just continued to insist that he was right and I--the one person who should know better than anyone else what happened to me--was wrong. I can just imagine his conversation with Step Skank on the ride home. "Oh, the poor thing. She's still in denial 15 years later. We're going to have to stage an intervention. After all, recognizing that you have a problem is the first step on the road to recovery."
Yeah, I recognize that I have a problem all right. My problem is that I have the world's most-screwed up family. There. I said it, but how do you recover from that? Now that Sarah Palin has resigned as governor of Alaska, I guess I could recover by moving there and buying me a nice little igloo to hide in.
Wait. I forgot that I don't like the cold. Oh, well. I guess I'll have to settle for beating my head against the wall while my father, my grandmother, my sister, or someone else rewrites even more of my history. Good times.
