‘I had her funeral planned’
It’s Eating Disorders Awareness Week.
But you probably didn’t know that.
People understand cancer. They understand heart disease. They’re beginning to understand mental illnesses.
But eating disorders are overlooked. Treatment programs are underfunded.
These diseases attract little sympathy, and are often seen as an affliction of privileged teenagers. Yet anorexia is the deadliest psychiatric illness of them all. It kills 10 per cent of individuals who have it, according to the National Eating Disorder Information Centre.
Doreen Houle of Conestogo has lived through the hell of a child with an eating disorder.
Her daughter, Emilee, was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes at a year old. Since Grade 8, Emilee has also struggled with eating disorders, including bulimia and not taking her insulin when she is supposed to.
Insulin allows people with diabetes to process their food and keep blood sugars at a reasonable level. It also signals the body to store food as fat.
Emilee started losing weight after someone at school had called her fat. “She became very skeletal,” said Doreen.
Like a lot of other people who have eating disorders, Emilee suffered from anxiety and from being a perfectionist.
She did ballet and modelling, two activities that, along with gymnastics and figure skating, have a high correlation with eating disorders.
She was an overachiever who wanted to fit in, and didn’t quite know how, her mother said.
After her first weight loss, Emilee ate very little. She seemed to recover in Grades 10 and 11 to more normal routines.
But in Grade 12, her eating disorder had changed to the binge-and-purge cycle of bulimia, combined with over-exercising and refusing to take her insulin.
She became lethargic and withdrawn, with dark circles under her eyes.
It got so bad that Doreen figured out a way to work from home so she could be with Emilee.
At one point, the doctor monitoring Emilee was so concerned about her out-of-whack blood sugar levels and the damage to her organs that he told Doreen: “She needs to get this under control, or she won’t make it to (age) 25.”
“We thought we were going to lose our daughter,” Doreen said. “I had her funeral planned.” Doreen was grateful for the help of a local support group run by Barbara Arthur of Kitchener, a mother whose daughter had faced similar struggles.
Treatment and therapy programs were found for Emilee and the family, but there is no magic solution.
Emilee floated for a while, attending one university and then another. She became accredited as a ballet instructor.
A few years ago, she realized that her eating disorder was something that she needed to face on her own, away from her family.
She now lives in British Columbia with her boyfriend. She is more regular with her insulin most of the time. And she has made it past her 25th birthday.
But she is still triggered by events that most people would consider celebratory, like birthdays and Christmas, where there is lots to eat.
“She’s doing better than she was a few years ago,” Doreen says.
“But could I say to you that Emilee has recovered? No.”