There's so much going on right now, and my emotional landscape is a bit of a rat's nest, but there's one thing that I keep coming back to, so I want to talk about it here.
(Jay, if you're reading this, please stop here. The rest of this post will be too triggery for you. Love you, sweetie.)
Since Jay went through the NIH treatment in March, his relationship with food has been supremely fucked. It's been up and down, and good and bad, but mostly down and mostly bad, and right now, it's pretty much non-existent.
I suppose that's to be expected, given what they did to him at NIH and given how much chemo his body has been through (over 1,600 hours of intravenous, which doesn't count the months of pills after the IV stuff was over with).
What has surprised me is how this has completely fucked up my relationship with food.
I worked really hard, starting in 2006, to fix my relationship with food. I went from being addicted to sweet things and white flour things to crafting a healthy relationship between body and food. I knew the things that were good for me, and ate them with gusto. I knew the things that were bad for me, and avoided them with absolutely no angst.
But now, that's all broken. I'm not completely off my recovery program, but it's a fragmented mess. I have trouble eating with other people because so much of my meal time with Jay in Maryland was spent waiting for him to throw up. I have to eat hurriedly, either because I've left Jay at home alone while I'm eating, and that doesn't feel safe, or because I'm eating in the kitchen or the basement while he sleeps in the living room, and I can't let a single sound or smell reach him, or it could trigger a retching or vomiting session. Forget trying to cook anything in the house - it's impossible.
My conditioning around eating is just as deep as his, it just goes in a different direction. There's furtiveness, and embarrassment, and shame.
Whether or not we finally find a process to get Jay's relationship with food back to something like normal, I've got to find a way back myself.
Has medical marijuana been discussed? There are many delivery methods, and it is not toxic like pills are. Doesn't hurt your liver at all. The being "high" part seems irrelevant at this point if it helps.
ReplyDeleteYes, you do. It may not be easy, but it will be worth it.
ReplyDeleteWe've never met, but I've been thinking of you often in these final days, and it occurred to me to see what else you might have posted this morning after hearing the news...and this is the post that made me reach out to you.
ReplyDeleteI spent four months in an intensive outpatient eating disorder program last year. Less than two months after I "graduated," my husband had a stroke, and I'm back where I started.
You have my profound empathy.