1. Make friends. You'll need them.
Day one as an inpatient is extremely scary. You feel lonely, out of place and uncertain. You are about to do one of the hardest things in your life and you must know that you cannot do it alone.
And you shouldn’t have to.
The people that you befriend in treatment become your shoulders to cry on, your confidants and your supporters. Your treatment friends get you like no one else will. And when you can’t find the words to describe the way you feel, the friends you make in treatment will know intuitively how you feel.
Soon, you won’t need the words.
The people you befriend will become your family, and without them the battle is 10 times the burden to bear. Despite how hard it may be, know that the benefit from having them in your life will be worth it.
2. Poking and prodding by nurses occurs 24/7
You’re going to wake up at 4 a.m. and it’ll basically become habitual. You are eventually conditioned to learn how to sleepwalk to the nurse’s station to have your weight and blood pressure drawn.
If you’re lucky, you’ll get out before the Gatorade is even open.
3. The medication line takes forever.
It starts before and after breakfast/dinner and you’ll be up against pretty much every inpatient who has medication to take. You’re back to back with fifty people who all need to be watched and checked to have swallowed their medication… the line moves like molasses.
Plus, nurses typically like to have conversations with the inpatients at the meds window, which in turn, slows the process down even more.
Most of the time, due to the crawling pace of the med line, inpatients miss part of their morning and evening groups, which is looked down upon and is ‘not in the spirit of recovery.’
4. You leave with a set of new skills.
Everyone that goes into treatment comes out with many new skills, one of the most common is learning to knit. You learn how to knit anything and everything. Knitting is seen as an effective way to deal with anxiety and eating disorders (which are practically symbiotic).
It’s good for inpatients to learn to put their stress into creative and calming tasks that are non-harmful and occupy their minds and bodies— knitting is a prime distractor. A lot of people
5. There is no such thing as doing too many puzzles.
Television is restricted during the majority of the day, so during free time you are required to find something else to do. In my treatment center, the living area was covered in partially completed puzzles; often strew across the floor. Alongside them would be 3 to 5 games of “Banana-grams” going on at any given time.
Just like knitting, solving puzzles and playing games can be very soothing for those struggling with anxiety. These activities are also amazing ways for inpatients to come together and be drawn out of isolations if we are having a bad day.
Never say no to a game, and if you’re asked multiple times it’s probably because you seem like you could use the interaction from people going through the same hardships.
6. Television can be triggering…
On the rare occasion that we are allowed to watch television, things can get pretty awkward. One of the rules of treatment is that there should be no talk about body image, food, dieting or other topics of that nature so that treatment becomes a place to promote healing and acceptance.
It wasn’t until watching T.V. in treatment that I realized how many toxic food and diet commercials there are, how many times the word “fat” is tossed around, or how many comments are made about someone else’s body are said in modern-day entertainment.
There’s an eerie silence that would overcome the room every time a Papa John’s pizza commercial came on, or Kim Kardashian would talk about how fat she felt. We all knew what each other was thinking and feeling.
7. Crying is an everyday occurrence.
Actually, for most of us, crying occurred multiple times per day—before meals, after meals, during meals, during group sessions— you name it, someone has probably cried during it.
In treatment, it is something you just get used to. Sometimes you have absolutely no idea why you are crying and sometimes you know exactly why you are. Crying is, in fact, encouraged, as it is a sign of breaking down the walls we have all put up for years.
Crying isn’t the pain, it is the healing—the pain is what we all kept inside for years. In treatment we do not cry because they are weak, we cry because we have tried to be ‘strong’ for way too long
8. You don’t want to be ‘ortho’
‘Ortho’ is short for orthostatic, which is something you never want to be but are most of the time. Medically, orthostasis is when your blood pressure changes rapidly from lying down to standing up, and is really common among eating disorder patients.
In treatment, the cure for orthostasis is Gatorade. You drink the Gatorade until the orthostasis has dissipated…mind you this is typically at 4 A.M. If you are ortho in the morning that means that you have to drink Gatorade at snack too.
At that point, you’ve reached about four bottles of Gatorade and you feel like you might burst. You say to yourself, “I will never be ortho again,” yet you wake up the next morning at 4 A.M. and, surprise, surprise.
You are ortho again! At the end of your time in treatment, you never want to take a sip of Gatorade ever again.
9. There’s drama
It is nearly impossible to live drama free in a house with 50+ mostly teenage girls.
Just like in high school, in a sorority, etc. rumors are spread about so and so not eating all-day or so and so caught using other eating disorder symptoms. Despite the fact that we are all in the same boat, not everyone likes each other—people fight, people verbally attack each other and people lie to each other.
Cliques most definitely form and preconceptions of people are made and kept sometimes. Despite the fact that all of these things occur, for the most part, surprisingly, it doesn’t affect the recovery process and if it does, the perpetrators are called out during the weekly community meeting, which is a whole other drama of its own.
10. In the end, it saves your life.
In the beginning no one thinks that they need the help that inpatient treatment provides. You say “I am not sick enough for this” and “I can recover on my own,” but the reality is that you cannot.
They say “trust the process,” which is scary to those who are so used to what they thought was having complete control over themselves, their actions and the intended result of their actions. However, trusting the process was what saved my life.
Surrendering, and realizing that you need help is the first and probably hardest step in recovery, but in the end it is the most rewarding. Everything that I learned and did during those 6 weeks helped me free myself from the shackles of my eating disorder and live the life I deserve to live. I will be forever grateful and humbled by the time I spent in treatment.
