Any parent will tell you that holidays after kids, are certainly different. In many ways, they are much more fun. It’s such a joy to see the magic through their eyes. However, as we all know it’s never just about the kids. There are grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, eventually boyfriends and or girlfriends, and on and on. Everyone, wants the holiday to be special, everyone has an idea of how the holiday should go, everyone is extra emotional around the holiday. I don’t know about you, but for me the older the girls got the more I dreaded the holidays. No matter how hard I tried every year I felt like I was letting somebody down during the holidays. In our family we have both sides of grandparents in town The way we have figured out the best way to handle that is that we split holidays, one year Thanksgiving with my husbands side and Christmas with my side the next year we switch. It’s not ideal but it was the best we could do. This particular year’s Thanksgiving was with my husband’s side of the family. My husband has three older brothers but none live in our state. One was coming to town with his family, wife and three kids. One other brother was also in town on his own, he wasn’t going to stay for the holiday but ended up deciding to stay. We are a family of 5, Chris has both his mother and father still living, and at this time our middle daughter had a serious boyfriend who would be joining us for Thanksgiving dinner. I was going to do the cooking this year, so add those people up and it is a dinner for 14. None of this side of the family knew about what was going on with Caitie. So, needless to say the pressure was on.
I’m sure you are not shocked to hear that our written contract didn’t really work. I think it was the day after I left Caitie in Portales that I saw a tweet from her talking about how much fun she had playing volleyball that night. I texted her and reminded her of her promise not to exercise and she said playing volleyball isn’t really exercise. The blood work was sent to the doctors office and Dr. Tom wanted to see Caitie again, he was surprised she was still away at school. Despite these things, she made it through the week before Thanksgiving. She was scheduled to have classes Monday and Tuesday but we decided she was going to skip those days of school and come home early. We decided she should come home on Saturday. However, my side of the family who did know about what was going on had many opinions about how that should happen. Nobody was feeling great about her driving herself home. Caitie did not want us to drive to Portales just to drive her back home, she wanted to have her car and she felt she was fine. The only reason I really mention this is because this is just the start of well meaning family who have strong opinions about what should be done and how it should be done. This was just the beginning of the realization that maybe some of my loving family did not really trust my ability to handle this situation. I couldn’t really blame them, I didn’t trust my ability either, however, she was my baby and nobody would be more invested in doing the right thing by her than me. That had never been questioned before, but now things were different. In the end Chris and I met Caitie half way, and I rode with her into town. We made an appointment for her to see Dr. Tom again on Monday morning, and that afternoon Caitie and I had an appointment with eating disorders of NM. I still had work, as did Chris, the other girls were still in school so Caitie was left alone. She went to her appointment with Dr. Tom and we met at EDNM. At that appointment we spoke with a couple different people both separately and together. At the end of the interviews, the director told us that Caitie would need the highest level of treatment that they offer. Which is an extensive outpatient program. She would be at the facility six days a week for six hours per day. She explained that she would have a nutritionist who would work closely with her and she would need to follow their meal plan whenever she was not eating in the facility. They wanted her to start right away, the Saturday after Thanksgiving. However, they did say they would have to talk with Dr. Tom and see more about the blood work results and they wanted her to go for more blood work. We talked with a nutritionist who spoke to Caitie like a baby asking her if maybe she could handle eating a piece of bread with peanut butter on it for lunch. I felt overwhelmed, I still had to go to work the next day, I needed to complete grocery shopping for my dinner on Thanksgiving, I needed to clean, company was coming to town. I needed to convince Caitie to allow us to tell someone! At this point Caitie still felt even her sisters didn’t need to know. I hope you are getting the complete irony of this time. I’m on one hand trying to plan the most gluttonous holiday of the year for 14 people, while simultaneously trying to navigate my newly anorexic daughter’s treatment plan. Yep, I was a complete mess. So Tuesday we did more blood work, then Wednesday we went back to EDNM to discuss our arrival, so I thought. Caitie and I both spoke with a nutritionist for almost an hour. She discussed each meal in detail, she talked about what they would eat at the treatment center and how they would try to help her restore to a healthy weight. As we were finally finishing up, the director arrived and said she needed to talk to us. She sat down and in her very gentle counselor voice, said she was sorry but Caitie was just too sick to safely weight restore in an outpatient setting and because there is not an inpatient hospital in our town they suggested we go to Denver Colorado. Then she said that they had taken the liberty to call the treatment center in Denver, however they also didn’t feel it was safe for them to take her. They said she would need to go to an Acute Hospital also in Denver Colorado. It is basically an ICU type care hospital especially for people with severe eating disorders. They explained that the process of re feeding, is actually quite dangerous. At least it is when you are in the condition that our girl was in. I have not once mentioned in these blogs Caitie’s weight. We never talk numbers much anymore but we certainly did then. Eating Disorders are very tricky and the demon of the disorder likes to make it a competition, it likes it when the person suffering try’s to be more sick than his or her very sick friend. Numbers don’t matter. But I will say this, she was so far underweight that she wasn’t even close to being on any BMI chart. Her electrolyte levels were seriously out of wack. She was dehydrated and simply malnourished. Re-feeding when a person is in this condition can be fatal. It can cause seizures, heart failure, and comas. It was no joke, she had to be under constant medical supervision.
I can’t really explain how I felt at that moment, I heard what they were saying, I knew it was true, but it felt unreal. It was like a flashback to about two years earlier when we had found out from blood work that my father had cancer. We went to that oncologist appointment thinking we would learn of his treatment plan, but instead were told there wasn’t a treatment plan and he only had months to live. I remember feeling numb,confused, and heartbroken all together. Feeling worried about my family members, wanting to heal their hurt but too broken myself to know how. I remember feeling so hurt for my dad, how awful he must feel to be hearing this news, and at the same time feeling like my heart was being torn out of my chest from the thought of loosing him. This was very much the same. How had we gotten to this point? How had we let it get this bad? And worst of all, what if we are too late to fix it?
Caitie, initially said no, she did not believe she needed such extensive treatment. She felt they were over reacting. I couldn’t blame her, I wanted to believe that too. My husband was confused as well, he hadn’t been at the appointment and was very surprised to hear what we were telling him. He called Dr. Tom who explained to Chris, that when he had seen her in his office on Monday that he almost called an ambulance to take her to the emergency room because her vitals were so out of wack. He told us the only reason he didn’t was because he knew she was going to EDNM and that if he sent her to the emergency room they would have pumped her up with IV fluids, she would have felt better and would not go get the help she needed. I can’t express how grateful I am that we had such an insightful doctor, who really understood the big picture of getting our daughter help. So we all agreed she needed to get to the hospital. Remember now, this is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. The bookkeeper at EDNM had us fill out a bunch of paperwork which he rush faxed to the hospital in Denver. Everyone would be on vacation for the next four days, and we could not take her until she was cleared with our insurance. The Acute Hospital made that very clear. The paperwork said “Do Not Make Plans to Come Until We are Clear With Insurance!!!” It took a week to get that clearance. It felt like a month. In some ways I was grateful for the holiday because it kept me very busy, shopping, cleaning, cooking, entertaining company. Although my guests for Thanksgiving dinner really was like a bad joke. My mother in law who has a heart condition and has to be very strict with her salt intake, (and quizzed me about every dish and how much salt was in each item), my brother in law who was on a new total vegan diet, no meat, no cheese, etc.(he was not as adamant as my mother in law however he did want to tell us all about his new diet), the semi picky children, the wrestler boyfriend who needs to make weight, and my daughter with anorexia. Yeah, it will certainly go down as a holiday to remember. Caitie did however have a scare that day, she ate, probably more than she had eaten in a very long time. Then her and the cousins decided to try to go to the mall for Black Friday (Thursday) shopping. While there she started to not feel well at all and thought she might black out, she hid in a dressing room until she felt she could walk again and came home. She told her Dad and I about the incident, it had clearly scared her, she said she had never felt like that before. The next several days were just a waiting game to get the clear to go from the hospital. We finally got that clearance on Thursday, November 30th. So, on Friday the first of December, Caitie Chris and I loaded up the truck and left early to drive her to Denver. A six hour drive, they were expecting us by 1:00. You know how people say, “God only gives you what you can handle.” I think God was in our corner, we went there believing this would only be a two week stay, and then we would bring her home to continue treatment in Albuquerque. I know now that is not what they said at EDNM, but that is what my brain could process. It was all we could take at the time. Her stay in Denver would be much longer than two weeks, but we will talk more about that next time.
Supermom? 