PEOPLE, NOT MEDICAL RECORDS
By Elisa Landò
The problematic friend, the underweight patient, the capricious daughter and the granddaughter “too smart” to have fallen into an eating disorder.
Anorexia is sneaky: even before you lose weight it makes you lose yourself but, in the meantime, others build entire identities to stick to your
person.
By the doctors I felt treated like a classic case study, yet another girl who doesn’t want to eat and who has to gain weight. The protocol to follow was therefore simple: high-calorie food plan and weekly outpatient check-up.
But it didn’t work.
I didn’t feel taken seriously. I didn’t really feel considered.
The doctors weren’t trying to cure me, they were trying to cure my sick body.
With each visit I felt more and more helpless, small and judged by the fact that I couldn’t follow the diet they had given me. “If you don’t eat what we wrote in the food plan, we can’t do anything for you”. But that’s exactly the problem! I can’t eat and I’m asking you for help to do it!
I couldn’t follow their instructions because I couldn’t trust them. We had never had a confrontation or a dialogue, there was no relationship of mutual respect: they were the doctors and I was the sick patient; their task was to ‘prescribe me the medicine’ and my task was to take it, obey without asking me questions.
The problem is that when you get anorexia the only thing you worry about, the only thing in your life that you still value, is how your body looks from the outside, how much you weigh and what you look like, and, since this is the only element that now keeps the small fragments of your
person precariously attached together, you obsessively control it.
You can’t delegate control over nutrition to an outside person because it’s the only means that anorexia recognizes as useful to achieve your (its) sick purpose. You don’t let your mother help you, let alone doctors you don’t even know!
You can’t afford it.
“Nobody understands you”, “Nobody knows what you’ve been through”, “Only you know what’s best for your body”… screams the Ed in your head.
The situation started to improve when I started to question my thoughts. Maybe not all the ‘suggestions’ of life that the ED generously gave me made me happier… (in fact, none of them!).
So, slowly, I began to listen to the words of people who, with a clear mind, I knew wanted nothing but my good (or at least see me alive. Literally) and, with the help of a psychologist
from whom I finally felt understood, seen and above all considered as a person and not as a body to be adjusted, I opened up to the food care of other doctors.
Slowly in my life and in my thoughts other things and interests have returned in addition to the shape of my body: evenings with friends, commitments at university, desires and plans for my future… The more space I made for these things, the more the obsession with weight and control over food was reduced. Slowly food has become an ally again, a useful tool that helps me and my body to have enough energy during the days.
Slowly I realized that having the mental concentration to prepare for a university exam is more satisfying than resisting hunger for hours, that taking a walk on the waterfront is more pleasant if the view does not fog up at every step and that, in the end, living without having enough energy to do it is not really living.
Anorexia is not a whim, it is not a categorical rejection of food or medical care.
Anorexia is not allowing yourself to loosen control over food for fear of losing what little you think you have left.
You don’t heal just with a food plan, you heal with confidence, with listening and with the desire to really get to know the patient.
We “anorexics” are not all the same. We are different people with different stories, we have different fears, different dreams, different difficulties, different aspirations, different bodies… and a similar disease.
We “anorexics” are people, not medical records.