Getting Back In The Ring
Mike Kraft is a former sports journalist and member of The Emilee Connection- Adult Eating Disorder Support Group. He is intelligent, witty, kind, and determined. Mike’s talents and attributes shine through as he openly shares reflections, challenges and victories on his healing journey. Mike can be reached at: mkraft418@gmail.com
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“Why do we fall, Bruce?”
“So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”
The above dialogue comes from a scene in Batman Begins where Thomas Wayne is carrying a young Bruce Wayne to bed after being injured from a fall down a well on their property. While the question and subsequent answer comes from a work of fiction, the words have a great deal of truth to them. Humans learn from their mistakes and are made better as a result. When the adversity of life knocks us down, our instinct is to get up and fight back. While our triumphs come with a wonderful sensation of happiness and accomplishment, we tend to learn more from our lowest moments than we do when we’re on the mountaintop.
It’s been quite a long time since I last wrote a blog post (August 2023 to be exact) and a lot has happened in my life since. I wish I could say the past year has been nothing but joy and fulfillment, but I’d be lying. It started great, but sadly unraveled at a breakneck pace and I found myself falling into the bottom of a dark well with seemingly no ladder for help. I never imagined things would go south in such a hurry, but anybody who’s either suffered from an eating disorder or has a loved one that’s going through it will tell you: eating disorders suck and they don’t care about your happiness.
I guess I should start from the beginning. Not long after my family and I returned home from an amazing two-week vacation in Japan (I can’t believe it’s already been a year since that trip), I received a job offer to return to sports journalism as a sports reporter in Bismarck, North Dakota. It was a dream come true. It seemed like fate, as less than 48 hours before the job was posted on the Internet, I had reached out to the sports editor at the paper asking if there was any opportunities at the paper. I figured it was a long shot, because this isn’t like the old days where you could just show up at a place of employment and ask for a job and if the boss admired your moxie enough, he would find space for you. No, in today’s world, if a place of employment doesn’t have an open position with the company, then there is nothing any one can do unless your extremely famous. Companies have strict budgets for salaries and they can’t just open up a position for someone who asks if it’s not in the budget. So I assumed my request would be met with a shrug of the shoulders and a “Sorry, but there’s nothing I can do to help you out,” but unbelievably a job posting at the paper popped up on the job boards soon after.
I applied for the job, and roughly a month later I found myself back in sports journalism for the first time since 2015 and back in North Dakota for the first time since 2014. I had begun my journalism career in Minot, North Dakota, from 2012-14 and loved nearly every minute of it. It wasn’t until after I left to take a job closer to home that I realized just how much I loved it out in the upper Midwest. I didn’t think I would ever have the chance to head back out there, so I was overjoyed when the opportunity presented itself. I had been out of the sports journalism game for so long due to reoccurring relapses from my eating disorder that I worried that no newspaper would take a chance on me. I told myself that I wasn’t going to squander the opportunity and that I was going to make a career out of my new home. I honestly thought I would spend the rest of my life in Bismarck, and would have been happy to do so.
Well...I squandered that opportunity rather rapidly. Despite loving the job and the independence, in just four short months, I returned home for Christmas vacation. I had booked a round-trip flight, but it unfortunately ended up being a one-way flight. I was not on that flight back to Bismarck come December 27. My health had deteriorated to such a point that I more than likely would have died in a matter of months had I returned to North Dakota.
For as broken as I was physically, I was even more broken mentally. I returned home a shell of myself, overwhelmed with feelings of embarrassment, shame, disappointment and unrelenting sadness. My eating disorder had taken things away from me before – it wasn’t the first time it had cost me a job – but it was the first job I had lost that I didn’t want to give up. I tried convincing myself throughout the Christmas break that I was healthy enough to go back to North Dakota, but my body was sending every signal it could refuting my belief. It took me nearly two days to recover physically from a day spent in and out of airports. I spent most of the first 48 hours home on the couch or in bed because I barely had the strength to walk more than a few feet. I nearly passed out on three separate occasions the first morning I was home. I was attempting to make breakfast, but upon standing for too long, I could feel the room spinning around me and all I could do was put my head down on the kitchen table and wait for the feeling to pass. It happened three times in about five minutes before I was finally able to complete prepping my breakfast. That never happened again, but the overall weakness I was feeling stayed with me. I barely had the energy to decorate the Christmas tree or wrap presents.
The hardest part was the phone call to my boss telling him that I wasn’t coming back. I felt like I was letting the entire newspaper down. We were already a small three-person team trying to cover an entire city’s worth of high school and college athletics, and now just the two of them would be tasked with trying to navigate the busiest time of the year being severely short- staffed. He asked if I would be willing to go on short-term disability, but I refused, partly because I was too embarrassed to give the reason for my resignation and I also because I knew I wouldn’t be recovered enough in the time short-term disability covers that I would have to resign anyway. That day will probably go down as the worst day of my life. It was the day where I broke, my whole life shattered. I no longer felt like I had a reason to continue. It felt like my eating disorder had finally claimed victory over me after a nearly 20-year battle. I have never considered myself suicidal, but in that moment, I considered it.
I had always been of the belief that the only way to overcome an eating disorder was to find something to replace it with. In my mind, there was one of two ways: 1. Find the love of your life that makes you feel special or 2. Find your dream job. I had come to the conclusion that option 1 might not be in the cards for me, but I truly felt like I had achieved option 2 when I accepted the job in Bismarck. When my parents and I loaded up the car and made the 1,000-mile journey to the capital of the Peace Garden State, I thought my eating disorder would stay behind. But that wasn’t the case. Like a shadow, my eating disorder was waiting for me when I arrived, although it did not show itself for a couple months. But when it showed up, it made up for lost time.
I arrived in Bismarck in late August, and by late October I knew I was in trouble. My weight was dropping at a steady pace, as I wasn’t eating enough to offset the copious amount of walking I was doing in my free time. I was only really eating one meal a day. On the days that I worked, I would eat lunch right before I took off for work and then bring a snack bag with my to hold me over the rest of the day. On the days I wasn’t working, my only meal would be at dinner time. All the free time I had was spent walking. I didn’t make an effort to explore the area or meet new people. I spent the majority of my time alone. To make matters worse, I was beginning to experience malabsorption. My body was ridding itself of the food I was eating as quickly as I was putting it into my body. That only added to more extreme weight loss.
I should have gone to the doctor, as this was going on for the better part of two months without reprieve, but as most people with eating disorders will tell you, I both have a fear and a distrust for doctors. I worried that if I were to see a doctor in my current condition, they wouldn’t let me leave the office and I would be involuntarily admitted to the hospital as I would be labeled as a danger to myself. I didn’t have a doctor at the time and no doctor would conduct a full physical examination without coming to the conclusion that I needed immediately medical attention that would require months in the hospital. Not only did I not want that, but I had a pretty cheap medical insurance plan that had an $8,000 deductible and I wasn’t really interested in draining my bank account for help I didn’t necessarily want at the time.
There’s a chance I’d still have a job had I opted to go see a doctor, but my fear of seeing a doctor kept me away. When I was seeing a dental service to talk about having major reconstructive surgery done on my teeth, they wanted me to get a bone density scan to ensure that the bone in my jaw was healthy enough to have the procedure done. Since that would have required a referral from a doctor, I decided not to have the procedure done. So just like that, my dream job was gone. I had waiting roughly a decade to get back into sports journalism and return to North Dakota, only to have my eating disorder destroy my dream in a matter of months. It sent me spiraling into a deep state of depression. I was too weak to return to North Dakota to pack up my apartment and get my stuff home, so my parents did it for me. They flew out there, packed up my apartment and thoroughly cleaned it before driving my car back to Rochester. They were gone for about a week. All of this took place in the dead of winter – not the most idealistic time to be moving to or from North Dakota, where the temperatures are pretty consistently in the single digits with negative wind chills.
The months that followed did nothing for my physical or emotional state. While it was nice to be around family and have that constant social interaction I was missing while living alone, my mind was still fixated on what I had lost. There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t think about North Dakota. I would look at the digital edition of the newspaper on my phone just about every day to see how the staff was managing a chaotic time in the sports calendar. With just two of them, they had to find a way to cover boys and girls basketball, boys and girls hockey, boys and girls wrestling, boys swimming and diving, gymnastics, as well as the local junior hockey program and three area colleges. To their credit, they managed, but they would have been able to provide more coverage had I not had to leave my position.
By the time my birthday had come around in April, I had completely given up hope that recovery was even a possibility for me. I had given it another go in early March, attempting to create meal plans and eat a larger diet in an attempt to gain some weight and get back some of my strength. I was feeling pretty good at the time with the increased nutrition to the point where I sent an email to my former boss letting him know that I was getting better and there was a chance that I could be available to come back to the job in the fall if they needed me. I was hoping that email would be met with a “That’s great! We’ll save your old job for you and when you’re ready to come back, just let us know and we’ll be glad to have you back.” But instead, the email read more like “I’m glad you’re feeling better, but right now you should focus on your health as it’s what’s most important right now. If there is ever something that comes available here in the future, I’ll be sure to keep you in mind.” In other words, “Thanks, but we’re moving on.”
While most people in their mid-30s are celebrating their birthday by getting together with friends for a fun night out or celebrating it with cake and ice cream with their families, I was getting my ducks in order to say goodbye to my life. There comes a time in the life of anyone with an eating disorder where they hit a fork in the road and have to make a decision: recover or die. I guess there is technically three decisions: recover, voluntarily give yourself up to the eating disorder and die, and not be able to make a decision and die. The difference between Option 2 and Option 3 is how much of a headache you’ve left your loved ones. With Option 2, things like power of attorney and a will have been created and someone has access to your financial records. With Option 3, none of that is completed and your loved ones spend the next year fighting the court system to gain access to all of your assets and then try to figure out who gets what. Option 2 is much less messy than Option 3.
I opted for Option 2. I provided my parents with a document that had all of my username and passwords to all of my accounts and put their names on my bank accounts so they would be able to move money out of my accounts without any issue. I completed a power of attorney and had it notarized. I gave my mom a list of friends to contact when I passed away, as well as instructions as to what would be done to my body. I wanted my brain to be donated to science for research purposes and I wanted to be cremated, with my ashes to be spread near the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada, as well as somewhere in Tokyo, Japan.
We looked into palliative care, and had a care manager from one of the nearby centers come to our house and discuss potential options. Palliative care for eating disorder patients is a hotly-contested debate in the medical field. There are some doctors that believe that eating disorder patients should be granted palliative care if their condition is severe enough, but there are far more medical professionals who don’t believe that eating disorder patients should be eligible for palliative care because there is a “simple” solution to improving their condition: eat. We knew it would be an uphill climb to be accepted into palliative care, but I was willing to try. It wouldn’t have required me to live out the rest of my days in a facility, as I would be allowed to remain in the house for as long as it was still possible. But palliative care would have given me access to pain-reducing medication and regular home visits from a nurse. But the first step was getting the approval from both my primary care doctor as well as the palliative care director. The care manager said she would talk to her team at the palliative care facility, and if they viewed me as a candidate, they would reach out directly to my primary care physician for a referral.
It became a waiting game. We thought we would hear back in a week’s time, but a month went by and we had still heard nothing. In the meantime, my condition was getting worse. In early May, I had developed a terrible chest cold I originally believed to be pneumonia. It wasn’t pneumonia, but it was a suffering nonetheless. I constantly felt like I was drowning from all the fluid in my lungs. I couldn’t lay down flat without coughing and therefore had to sleep sitting upright for several days. Cough medicine did nothing. I made a rattling sound anytime I breathed. I became so weak that stairs were becoming a herculean task. I had no energy ever. I thought death was inevitable at that point.
It was then I decided to reach out for help. Living the way I had been living for the past five months could not be any more of a suffering than attempting recovery once again. Recovery was going to be harder than simply letting myself die, but the suffering I was experiencing was just too great to want to keep going down that path for even one more day. People seem to think that those with eating disorders eventually pass away in their sleep. That’s the ideal scenario, but the truth of the matter is that’s almost never the case. And if someone was to die in their sleep from an eating disorder, it’s preceded by months and months of pure torture. No, most people with eating disorders either die from cardiac arrest or from suicide.
I have intrinsic motivation for recovery in the form of hopefully one day being able to get my old job back and making sure I’m healthy enough to do so if the opportunity presents itself, but I’m also extrinsically motivated. My parents are my biggest extrinsic motivation. I hate to see them suffer and even though my mom had told me several times that she had accepted my decision at the time to not seek recovery and instead let the disorder take my life, I never truly believed her. My mom and I have had not just a strong mother-son relationship, but I lot of times it felt much like a friendship. We go to movies together. We play board games together. We go on walks together. We do a lot of things together that very few mothers and sons still get to do together as we grow older. That’s why my worry for them grew more as my condition worsened. I worried that their freedom could very well end when my life ended. I worried that if I were to pass away in the house and medical personnel came to take my body away, they would immediately inform the police and child protective services because they would suspect abuse due to how skeletal my body was. Even though they were not the least bit at fault for what happened to me, they would assuredly be questioned by law enforcement and there would be a chance that they might be taken to court on charges of neglect. I had received reassurance from a therapist I was seeing briefly that they would be safe from any prosecution due to both my medical diagnoses as well as the fact that there were records of my many attempts at recovery. It would have been enough evidence to prove that my parents were encouraging my attempts for help. But that didn’t put my mind at ease because they would still have to defend themselves in a court of law and there was always the chance that the case could make the news and become public, putting my parents’ names out to the masses. Even if they were found not guilty, that wouldn’t be good enough for those that feel like they should have been found guilty. They would end up getting harassing phone calls day and night and they wouldn’t be able to go anywhere in public without someone making a nasty comment in their direction. Their lives would become a misery, and it’s not something I wanted to put them through and it’s not something they deserved.
So I reached out for help in the way that anyone in their 30s would do in 2024: I went to Reddit and found a couple eating disorder subreddits. I made sure they weren’t pro-Ana subreddits before writing my post as I was not looking for tips on how to be the best anorexic. When I completed the proper vetting, I asked the groups if there was a facility anywhere in the country that wasn’t so hellbent on growth charts and BMI to get you to a weight where they wanted you to be and took none of your feedback into consideration and instead focused more on harm reduction and working with you to create a plan that accomplished the goals you wanted to get out of life. For me, I am no longer looking for a program that was going to force feed me until I reached what they thought was weight restored. I’ve been to facilities that have done that in the past and I’ve always been at such a low weight at the start that the amount of weight they had to put on me in such a short period of time was a traumatic experience for me. It wasn’t something I was looking to replicate. I got plenty of feedback with suggestions and to my surprise, the most common answer to my question was in a familiar part of the country: Sanford Health in Fargo, North Dakota.
What set Sanford apart from all the other treatment centers I researched was they had a SEED track for adults. Severe and Enduring Eating Disorder – or SEED – is a term used to describe the most serious and long-lasting eating disorders. A relatively new term in the eating disorder community (it was first coined in the 1980s), there is no universally accepted definition or criteria, but it takes into account the number of years a person has been suffering as well the number of unsuccessful treatment attempts. Other criteria include the level of severity of the eating disorder and how much it impacts a person’s life. I fit the SEED model. I have suffered with an eating disorder for 20 years and I have experienced six relapses. It has also impacted several areas of my life, making it difficult for me to hold down a job or live independently.
Sanford is one of the only treatment facilities in the country that offers a SEED program. Since there is very little research, there is currently no evidenced-based treatment plans for SEED patients, which is why such few facilities offer this option. The biggest difference between a SEED program and the standard recovery program is a SEED program focuses more on improving the quality of life of a patient rather than focusing on reducing the symptoms of the eating disorder. In a SEED program, therapy such as CBT, DBT and ACT are modified to focus on improving quality of life and harm reduction. SEED programs don’t force recovery on a person, but rather attempts to motivate a person to change their behaviors by improving their quality of life.
With a SEED program, Sanford is a popular option for many patients, as evident by the waiting list that stretched 8-9 weeks. Along with their SEED program, they also have a standard recovery track for adults as well as a standard recovery track for adolescents. Adolescents are not eligible to partake in the SEED program and the medical team is the one that makes the determination as to whether they will accept an adult into the SEED program. There is a maximum total of eight patients in the program with adults and adolescents being paired together instead of separated.
I reached out to Sanford in late May to get my name on the waiting list. After sending them over some recent medical records, I had an intake with the intake coordinator. It was a 45-minute questionnaire about my medical history and what I was hoping to get out of the program. The intake coordinator then took the information to the medical team and she called me the next day to inform me that I was being accepted into the SEED program. The program lasts a minimum of three weeks and I can opt to take part in the recovery program at any point if I so choose. The recovery program can last up to two months. I was given the official program schedule by the intake coordinator and there’s a lot of familiar groups: ACT, Emotions Group, Life Skills, CBT, and DBT. There are fitness groups each day as well, which is a welcome site as most treatment facilities will barely allow you to walk from your room to the kitchen table let alone dedicate a 55-minute group to being active. There are meal planning groups each day. Every Wednesday is a lunch outing at a restaurant and every Saturday afternoon patients watch a movie with the incorporation of an afternoon snack. The day starts at 6 a.m. and lights out is at 10 p.m. Monday-Friday and 11 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.
With my name on the waiting list, I am admitted to Strong Memorial Hospital once again for medical stabilization purposes. Sanford – being a medical hospital – had the ability to also stabilize me medically, but I felt it was too dangerous for me to travel in my current condition. They also didn’t accept my current insurance, so I was going to have to purchase a new insurance plan before I could officially be accepted into their program, or I had the option of private paying to the tune of nearly $1,500 per day.
After a nearly two week wait, I returned to my home away from home at Strong, seeing a number of familiar faces. I spent the next 12 days in the hospital, which was a record for me in terms of the shortest length of stay. I’m usually in the hospital for close to a month because of how long it typically takes to stabilize me. I did go into refeeding syndrome once again, with my electrolytes dropping to dangerous levels just a few days into the hospital stay. But I overcame it in just a matter of days and no longer required electrolyte supplementation to keep my levels at a normal level. My feet swelled to the size of elephant feet as a result and that discomfort remained throughout my stay. I couldn’t even wear my shoes when I was discharged home. It took another week before they returned to their regular size. A symptom of the eating disorder that I had always managed to avoid in the past reared its ugly head this time around as I lost a great deal of hair. It didn’t start until after I had returned home from the hospital, but every day in the shower I would notice clumps of hair in the drain. Any time I ran my hands through my hair when it was wet, my hands would be covered in strands of hair. This continued for about two weeks before it finally stopped. While it didn’t result in random bald spots, it did leave me with a thin covering of hair on my head. I’m not all that concerned about it as I know it will eventually grow back, although it will take quite a bit of time. I’ve been told multiple times that hair regrowth is one of the last stages in the recovery process as it’s the body’s lowest priority when it comes to healing and repair.
I left the hospital on June 24, and still had more than a month before heading off to Sanford. By the time you’re reading this, I am in the program. I purchased a private insurance plan that took effect on August 1. While expensive, it paid for itself in less than two days of treatment. I did my best to stay busy during the gap between treatments. I discovered a new hobby of building LEGO sets. I seem to have a knack for picking some of the most expensive hobbies imaginable. I still love playing video games, which nowadays requires a $500 console and the standard cost for a new video game is $70. Couple that with headphones that begin around $100 and every controller is at least $60, and you have an expensive hobby. LEGOs aren’t much cheaper, as any kit over 1,000 pieces if going to cost at least $100. I have my eyes set on a Titanic LEGO set, which is 9,090 pieces and comes in at a whopping $679.99.
I also made sure to get some fresh air from time to time and got out of the house with my family. I went to a Red Wings baseball game, listened to a Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra concert down at Ontario Beach Park and went to a 4 th of July party at the Greece Town Hall. I also returned to the support group at the Emilee Connection for the first time since leaving for North Dakota. When I moved back home, I was too embarrassed to show my face anywhere and therefore kept myself locked in the house. I spent the majority or the winter and spring hiding from society.
While I continue to feel better physically and am getting back some of my strength, the mental battle continues to be a struggle. Just recently, I discovered that I had officially been replaced at my old job in Bismarck. It was quite the gut punch and honestly felt like I had just found out that a loved one had died. As the months after my departure came and went without a new hire, I was beginning to hold out hope that maybe they were keeping the position open for my return. I thought that perhaps my phone was going to ring and it was going to be from my boss asking if I’d like to return to the paper in September when the fall sports season got under way.
Even if I wasn’t ready to go back, I would have accepted the offer anyway because returning to my old job is what I want the most at the moment. That’s why it was so devastating to see the new byline. My hopes were dashed and the road back to Bismarck had been closed. One of my biggest motivations for recovery was now gone. I worry that my stay at Sanford might be the last time I find myself on North Dakota soil. I hope that’s not the case, as there’s nothing more I want than a chance at redemption.
I’m sure anybody reading this is wondering why I’m so fixated on North Dakota when there are 49 other states with just as many opportunities – if not more. I’ll admit, I’m probably one of the only people in the country that would rather live in North Dakota than New York or California or Florida, but there is just something about North Dakota that calls to me. It’s kind of like how Elsa hears the Enchanted Forest calling to her in Frozen II (Plot spoiler alert for any of the 20 people in the country who didn’t see Frozen II). North Dakota will always hold a special place in my heart. It was the first place to give me an opportunity out of college when the other 30-plus places I applied to all said no or straight up ignored my applications, and they were willing to give me a chance after nearly a decade removed from the journalism industry. Sure, I’m definitely not what you would consider “North Dakota material.” You’ll never see me harvesting crops out on the farm at 5 a.m. or tending to the horses, but I just have this sense of connection with North Dakota that I don’t really have with New York or really the East Coast as a whole. The toughest part of being in North Dakota was being away from family. I guess that’s the downside of having a good relationship with your family is that you’d like to spend time with them as opposed to spending more time away from them. For some, only having to endure their families for one or two times a year is a blessing, but for me that was difficult, especially around the holidays. Being that far away meant missing out on most holidays, as well as birthdays and other family gatherings. You can’t just pop in for a quick visit when you’re living 1,000 miles away.
I try to tell myself the pain of losing my job will subside with time, but then I’ll think about a memory – no matter how small – and it’ll jar me as if someone just poked me in the back of the neck with a thumbtack. I try to pretend that I’m OK, but the truth is I’m not. I miss being out on the field covering a football game on a Friday night. I miss being at the hockey rink covering a hockey game between the two rival schools. I miss being courtside covering a big basketball game or volleyball match. Heck, I even miss being around the broncos and bulls covering the rodeo. I miss my apartment and the independence it symbolized. There are boxes upon boxes of stuff from my old apartment in our basement and I fear that they will go unopened for years if not decades. Aside for four months, I have been living at home with my parents since May 2019. The COVID epidemic came and went during that time frame.
I spend too much time wondering what my life would have been like had I not fallen victim to the eating disorder. I was on a successful path before it all came apart and it’s hard to watch others be gainfully employed and moving up the corporate ladder while also getting married and having a family. Currently, I have none of that and sometimes I feel like I’m running out of time to make anything of my life. Yes, mid-30s is not old, but it can be difficult to convince an employer to hire you when there is someone just as talented that’s 10 years younger and demands a lower salary also seeking employment who you don’t have to worry about needing to take a medical leave of absence at any given time.
It’s been a difficult year to say the least and the sad part is it isn’t even over yet. I feel like I haven’t accomplished a single thing. I have literally not worked a single day in 2024 and outside of a little birthday money, I have netted $0 in income, which is difficult when you have monthly credit card statements and car lease payments that run until 2026 (it pains me to see my car with the New York license plates after having to remove the North Dakota plates after re- registering my car in New York). I hope I’m able to return to the workforce at some point even if it’s something temporary, like a retail job. But for now, the focus is on recovery and the next step in my journey will take me back to North Dakota for the month of August in hopes of finally overcoming this dreaded disease. There are times where I feel like Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner is my eating disorder. I do everything in my power to get rid of it, and even when I think I’ve trapped it in a box, tied it in chains and thrown it off a cliff, by the time I turn around, it’s standing right behind me, beeps in my face and then speeds off down the road. I’m hoping Sanford can help level the playing field and set me up for the long-term success I’ve desperately been seeking.
I’ve been knocked down quite a bit this year, so now it’s time to learn to pick myself up.
Mike Kraft