Theresa
Theresa approached as I sat in the hallway. I was new; I’d slept in sight of nurses. I’d taken 12+ hours to pee, since I couldn’t go alone. My first night, I could hear background screams as they stripped me, noted the marks on my body, found in my bag a blade I’d forgotten about. In the morning Colleen, released from seclusion, told them her head was wobbly on her neck; the meds they’d knocked her out with. The boys were together. There were only a few of them, and they, grudgingly, respected me; I had gone so much further than they dared. I understood their false bravado, the cover of cuts.
I had a certain respect for Theresa. She was a real anorexic, not the sort of girl who just stopped eating occasionally, just as I was a real cutter, not the sort of girl who just occasionally kissed her skin. I had the severe anemia, the web of thousands of scars, the same objective proof as my comrade. She was skeletal; she had to wear a gown to meals, then sit around in it being watched by staff. Her bird bones protruded, delicate and sharp, from the layer of downy hair that coated her body; anorexics develop it because their bodies burn use the fat that should warm them.
I was crying. I wasn’t much of a crier except when shattered, but I was locked up, scared in a way I’d never been before. There had been a Meeting, my parents, my principal, my therapist — years later that I realized the latter two had finally put their collective feet down after years after witnessing hundreds of angry slashes, a labyrinth populating my skin.
If you’re crazy but haven’t gone completely mad, still have some sense of the basic contours of reality, being around the others is reassuring; we were all here together, this locked land of 15 minute checks, nurses tightening pressure cuffs, peering into our mouths to ensure we had swallowed, docs who saw us for a few minutes, techs leading groups, handing out coping strategies. They were the others. We were the ones who did not leave.
Theresa sat next to me. She had a heavy German accent; she was about to go to a treatment center in Germany “I’ll get better, or I’ll die,” she would say, matter of factly: a quicker version of the choice we’d all have to make. Anorexia has the highest death rate, but we cutters are about 10x more likely to suicide, and there are the accidents; years later I would nick an artery, develop MRSA in a muscle, require nerve surgery. Once you have decided to push there is never any telling where it might end.
“The hospital is like a monument,” she told me. “Going up is hard. Going down is easier.” Much I realized she meant mountain, and of hospital its true: they are unbearable at first,then slowly and then all at once, they are home.
When I left that first unit I assumed I would think of them daily and for a long time I did. Now when I think of units it’s other patients who come to mind, other stories, other intense friendships: the psychotics, the heroin addicts, the rambling schizophrenics, the regular depressives. Other nurses doing dressing changes and dispensing meds; other docs peering over glasses and offering little; other techs handing out ice packs and weighted blankets. But it’s always Theresa at the bottom, trying to explain something to me that I still do not understand: where, I wonder, is the peak?
