Six Months Later
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 and enlightens us as he openly shares reflections about his journey with Anorexia.
Mike can be reached at: mkraft418@gmail.com
Six months can feel like an eternity. Six months can also feel like it goes by in a blink of an eye. That’s how I would describe the last six months of my life. At times I can’t believe it’s already been six months, but there are other times I can’t believe it’s only been six months. It’s felt like forever and nothing in the same instance.
March 23, 2023, marked six months since I was admitted to the emergency room at Strong Memorial Hospital for my continued struggle with an eating disorder. It was September 23, 2022, when my mom and I made the 25-minute drive to what had become like a summer home for me, seemingly spending a month or two there every year. I had a doctor’s appointment the day before and was told by my primary care physician that I needed to go to the emergency room that day. My bloodwork showed that my vital organs were starting to shut down and my health was critical. My PCP normally has an upbeat and friendly demeanor, but that was replaced by a serious and concerned tone. I had been avoiding my PCP for that very reason: I knew my health was failing, but I didn’t want to get help. I had accepted my death months prior and had even looked into the possibility of hospice care. I knew going to the doctor was going to get me hospitalized. I still don’t know why I didn’t cancel the appointment.
I managed to extend my life free from hospital walls for one more night before heading to the ER the next morning. It gave me a chance to pack up some of my belongings. Packing for the hospital had become second nature to me, as this was the fifth time I had been admitted for my eating disorder. Clothes, bathrobe, slippers, laptop, phone, Nintendo Switch, cable chargers, and Paint by Sticker books. The essentials.
I was clinging to life by the time the morning came around. I remember being told by my doctor when I first started struggling with an eating disorder when I was a teenager that I couldn’t afford to lose any more weight. That I was teetering on the edge. Well, I weighed about 50 more pounds that day than I did on the day of my admittance, so clearly the edge was a lot further down the road than my doctor thought. But I don’t recommend playing Russian Roulette with your health. Your body is not meant to survive doing what I did to my body. By the time I got to the hospital, I was as close to a vegetable as you can get. I arrived in the ER in my pajamas, not because I wanted to be comfortable, but because I didn’t have the energy – or the ability – to change my clothes on my own. I needed to lift my legs with my arms to put on pants, tie my shoes and get into a car. If I was lying on the ground, I would need to find something to hold on to in order to lift myself off the ground because my legs were too weak. Stairs were painful and required both hands on the railings to get me to the top. I could barely even carry a cup of water up the stairs because I needed both of my hands free in to use the hand rails to take the strain off my legs. My voice was shallow, and my throat struggled to swallow any food I attempted to eat. I couldn’t sneeze or cough hard enough to clear my lungs. I feared eating almonds because I knew if a shard got caught in my throat, I was likely going to choke to death.
That’s just some of the physical issues I had. When I would go to bed, I barely had the strength to roll over, and when I’d wake up, it was a challenge to lift my neck off the pillow. I looked and felt lifeless.
As has been the case since COVID, the ER was packed. We had been told to admit through the ER because it would have been the quicker route compared to getting on the waitlist for the eating disorder program, which was currently between 1-2 weeks. Turns out it wasn’t that much faster. I waited for hours in the waiting room before being escorted to an overflow pop-up building adjacent to the ER, where I was in one of many makeshift cubicle rooms, where there was nothing more than a recliner chair. I was there for close to 10 hours before being moved into a room in the emergency room at just after midnight. I’d be there for five long days. Five very long days. I was not permitted to eat any solid foods while in the ER as mandated by my treatment team. Although I hardly spoke to them directly, the eating disorder team was monitoring my situation and was in charge of my treatment while in the ER. However, they weren’t down there with me and couldn’t ensure that I was receiving the proper care. With the ER overflowing with patients, I was barely monitored. I was supposed to receive five Ensure Plus supplements each day, but that never happened. Sometimes I’d get three. One day I’d get two. Other times I’d receive a tray of solid food. For those five days, I basically starved, eating tootsie rolls and caramels that my mom would bring me to curb the hunger. Why didn’t I alert the staff and have them bring me my required nutrition each day? Because I have an eating disorder. That’s why. It’s the equivalent of being afraid of the dark and reminding the staff to turn off all the lights if they forget.
But the worst part of the ER saga was the Dextrose shots. My blood glucose level was lethally low every time they would check it in the morning. Anything under 70 mg/dL is considered low and requires immediate intervention. If it’s just a little under that number, they’ll just give you some orange juice and recheck the levels 30 minutes later. But if it’s extremely low – like mine was – they administer an injection of dextrose through the IV directly into the vein. The lowest my blood glucose levels ever got during a single test was 14 mg/dL. I hated the injections because the dextrose syringe had to be kept in the refrigerator, so the solution was cold and it was 50ml, which took the nurse about a minute to empty the syringe into my vein. Having such little insulation, those dextrose shots left me shivering for what felt like hours even though it was probably just a few minutes. The shots also blew out my veins. Sometimes the effect of the dextrose lasted less than a few hours. There were a couple nights where they checked my blood glucose levels at 2 a.m., gave me the injection after seeing the levels were low, and restored my levels back to normal, only to check it again at 7 a.m. to see my levels drop again and therefore had to give me a second injection. I think I had about 7 or 8 injections over the five days and then received an overnight IV bag of dextrose on top of that.
Needless to say, my time in the ER was miserable. Thankfully, things improved once I got a bed in my designated wing of the hospital, but not at first. I’ll never forget those first 24 hours. I was moved up to my room around 7:30 p.m., where I had all of my belongings confiscated and I was stripped of all my clothing and made to wear a hospital gown. At my low body weight, I had trouble staying warm while wearing six of seven layers of clothing, and now I was somehow expected to keep warm wearing nothing but a thin hospital gown. Thankfully that particular room could get very warm with the heat cranked all the way up, so staying warm wasn’t an issue. Eventually, I got all of my stuff back and was able to wear my own clothes. But I still remember calling my mom on the room phone that night expressing how scared I was. I had been in the hospital before and gone through the program, but they had never been this strict.
The first night was rough, but the next day was the most difficult. After nearly a week without solid food, I was finally able to eat something that morning. But it didn’t go as expected. Hindsight being 20/20, it probably wasn’t the smartest idea having me eat a greasy sausage, egg, and cheese English muffin that had probably been sitting under a heat lamp for over an hour based on how evaporated into the bread the cheese was. That breakfast sandwich, along with 1.5 cups of milk, fruit, and an Ensure – which was only supposed to be given to me if I didn’t complete my breakfast, but a communication error had me drink it nonetheless – was too much for my system to handle at once and my body essentially went into shock. My body almost immediately rejected it upon completion and for the first time in my life, I felt like I was actually dying. I was lightheaded, my body could barely move and it felt like all of my organs were trying to leave my body. I barely could lift my head off the pillow the rest of the day as my body had been sapped of any energy it had left. In what seemed like a cruel joke, my lunch that day was a meatball sub with globs of mozzarella cheese on a sub roll the size of my head. On my first day of solid foods, they opted for a greasy breakfast sandwich you’d buy at a gas station and arguably the heaviest sandwich you could give a person for lunch.
That day was a turning point for me mentally. I have been physically restored to a healthy weight in the past, but it was never because I truly wanted to. There was always a part of me that wanted to go back to the illness. I never had that mental flip of the switch that is required in recovery. But that day, flipped the switch. It was a combination of how I felt physically on that day and how fed up I was having to rely on people I didn’t believe I could rely on to make the right decisions for me. Not the right decisions by what the book said, but the right decisions that were going to specifically help me. Physically, I had never felt worse. When I say I was weak I mean I was so weak after eating those meals and putting my system into shock that I didn’t have the energy to sit at the side of my bed and do a crossword puzzle.
Things improved from there. There were some obvious setbacks that were out of my control. I got refeeding syndrome and had to be put on IV drips of magnesium and phosphorous for a couple weeks. My feet swelled to the size of boulders, and it was painful to put on socks or wear my slippers. I had to wear a heart monitor for multiple days on two separate occasions, which made it impossible for me to shower. I also got COVID, which kept my parents from visiting for 10 days. But my health improved. My electrolytes stabilized, the swelling in my feet reduced and my energy levels were improving.
With my health stabilized, I was discharged on October 24. The medical team strongly encouraged me to go to a higher level of care, but my insurance created a roadblock. I was still too sick to qualify for a residential, but no longer sick enough to remain at Strong (raise your hand if that’s happened to you). They recommended Denver Acute, but not only did they not take my insurance, but they required me to be off of said insurance for three months. The team at Strong tried to talk me into private paying, saying it was an “investment to have a future,” which I took offense to. Telling someone to go into debt paying $1,500 per day for treatment that is essentially a 50-50 chance of succeeding didn’t make financial sense. Investing in crypto seemed to be the safer choice with my money. The other option we settled on was that I would buy a separate premium insurance plan that covered residential treatment. It didn’t make sense to drop my old insurance because, in the three-month waiting period to be accepted at Denver, I would either end up being too sick to be able to get myself there or my health would have progressed to a point where that level of care was no longer medically necessary.
Truth be told, I was never serious about changing my health insurance coverage. I wasn’t about to go from having free insurance that fully covered my doctor’s and nutritionist’s appointments to paying close to $400 per month for a plan that required additional co-payments for all my appointments just so I could become eligible for a treatment facility I wanted no part of attending. Being an adult, I had to be the one to sign the paperwork, so I never did.
When I was younger, I didn’t have an issue going to treatment centers because I felt like they were effective for someone my age. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that treatment facilities are not helpful to me. I don’t agree with just how little say you have in your own livelihood. You’re told what to eat. You’re told when to eat. You’re told when you can go to the bathroom. You’re told when to go to bed. My 3-year-old nephew has more autonomy than someone in treatment. Being a male doesn’t help. I didn’t have a problem sharing a space with females, but when everybody but me was a female, there was little to no effort to cater their lesson plans to include a male’s perspective. I’ve never felt like my hips were too big, so a 30-minute discussion about how I should learn to embrace my curves didn’t prove to be effective. I’d find myself in groups where we would read passages from research textbooks that only used the “she/her” pronouns. I’ve never been to a treatment facility focused on males, but I’ve heard they aren’t any less ineffective. I harbor my fair share of resentment toward the medical field because of how myself and others suffering from eating disorders have been treated in the past. That’s why I’d rather go down the path of recovery that doesn’t allow for anyone else to take credit for my successes. It always seems like when a patient succeeds in a program and continues down a path of recovery, the program they attended uses them as the shining example for why their program works and why others should come there while not taking any responsibility for all those who don’t find success in their program. It’s their way of saying, “See? We did that. We saved their life, and we can save yours too.” When in reality we’re doing all the work. Anyone regardless of a medical degree can feed someone. It’s the mental aspect that determines whether someone recovers, and treatment facilities usually delegate that responsibility to an outpatient team. If someone has made the decision to relapse after getting out of treatment, it’s going to happen.
So, I decided to choose the harder path, the one where I had to be responsible for my own recovery. The safeguards that would be put in place at a treatment facility were not there for me. It was up to me and me alone to recover. Yes, I had the help of my parents and my outpatient team, but there weren’t the same immediate repercussions at home as there would have been in treatment. If one day I didn’t want to eat, no one was going to be shoving a feeding tube up my nose. I took an enormous gamble for someone who won’t even pay the penny slots at a casino. I knew how big the stakes were. If I were to fail and have to go back to the hospital, any independence I had would be gone for a long time. The doctors would force me into treatment. I wouldn’t be allowed to leave the hospital until I enrolled in new insurance, and I would be on the next plane to some residential facility in another state the second a put my signature on the paperwork.
I gambled. And I won big. It’s been close to six months now since I was discharged from the hospital. In my last recovery attempt, it took less than six months before I was right back in the hospital, clinging to life. Now, I am stronger physically and mentally. I can climb stairs without any difficulty. I can pick myself up off the ground. I can help my family with chores around the house. I don’t fear mealtimes but instead, look forward to them. My diet isn’t anything too crazy, but it does include plenty of variety and balance. Physically, I look healthy, and all of my lab work prove it. All of my vital organs are functioning properly and there doesn’t appear to be any long-term damage. My bones aren’t the strongest for someone my age, as I have osteoporosis, but my physical activity from when I was younger may have kept them from degenerating faster. I’ll just have to be careful with what activities I do in the future. I don’t see myself playing backyard football or participating in mixed martial arts, so I should be OK. My teeth are also another casualty from my eating disorder, but it’s nothing modern dentistry can’t correct once I return to the work force and have a good dental plan. The reality is that I’ll probably need to replace every tooth in my mouth, and I’ve just come to accept that. It’s a minor silver lining that all the gaps in my mouth from extractions or teeth falling out is that none of them are visible when smiling.
Food no longer consumes my every waking thought. I used to strive on starvation. I believed I was at my best when I was hungry and able to fully concentrate on the task at hand. But I didn’t realize in the moment how preoccupied I was on food. My Instagram and YouTube algorithms were nothing but food and eating videos. And then when I did eat, I couldn’t focus on anything other than the food in my stomach. I would obsess for hours – sometimes more than a day if it was something I couldn’t easily look up the nutritional information – about the food I had just eaten. I was essentially paralyzed from the time I completed a meal to the time the fullness subsided. But now everything has reversed. I can’t focus on an empty stomach, and I now know how to properly nourish my body to be able to focus my mind elsewhere. I no longer think about the food I’ve eaten once the meal is over. There’s no point in obsessing about something you can’t control. As my obsession with food has subsided, my Instagram and YouTube algorithms have completely changed. Now it’s a lot of video game tutorials and hockey highlights.
But perhaps the most exciting part of my recovery is that opportunities have opened up that have been impossible for so long. I will be taking a 2-week vacation to Japan with my family in late June, a trip that has been on my bucket list since I was little. In the past, this trip was nothing more than a pipe dream. There was no way I would have had the stamina to be on my feet all hours of the day while eating out at restaurants multiple times per day, eating food without knowing its nutritional contents. My dad always dangled this trip to Japan in front of me like a carrot on a string, saying that if I was able to improve my health, he’d make the trip a reality. In the past, I’d crash and burn long before that became a reasonable discussion, but now it’s a reality. In two months, I’ll be halfway across the world.
My recovery has not been easy, but it’s been worth it. And it’s not over. I still have bad days, but they are as frequent as a full moon compared to in the beginning, where the frequency of bad days was more compatible to the frequency of cold temperatures in January. I think what helped me was having realistic expectations for my recovery. I’m not trying to return to my old self before the eating disorder. Having struggled with this disease for more than half my life, I’ve come to accept that a piece of the eating disorder will live with me for the rest of my life. It’s not a bruise that will eventually fade away, but rather a tattoo or a birthmark, a permanent partner. For the longest time, my eating disorder was in the driver’s seat, in complete control over where it took me. It took me down a road filled with isolation and depression. While I was able to kick it out of the driver’s seat, it’s still not out of the car and that’s fine. It’s been reduced to the annoying passenger sitting in the backseat of the car who occasionally will kick the back of my seat to make its presence known. It may make me lose focus for a moment, but I’m still in control of where I want to go. My primary goal was never to fully eradicate my eating disorder, but rather weaken it.
I’ve learned to let my anger toward my eating disorder go. Yes, it took away years of my life along with memories and opportunities, but that’s just what eating disorders do. I guess I can’t really be mad at something that did exactly what it said it would do. At this point, we all know how eating disorders operate, and mine did exactly what an eating disorder does. In a way, I felt like I summoned my eating disorder, and gave birth to it much like Frankenstein gave birth to Frankenstein’s Monster. I wanted protection and what answered my call was an eating disorder. It protected me, but its definition of protection far exceeded my intentions. My eating disorder became just like the robots in any science fiction movie where the robots attempt to exterminate the human race. The robots are created to serve mankind and do what has to be done to protect them. But as they grow to learn more about the human race, they discover that we’re our own worst enemy and therefore the best way to save mankind is to destroy it. That’s essentially what my eating disorder did. It tried to protect me, slowly isolating me from friends, families, and activities. You can’t be abandoned by your friends if you don’t have any. You can’t get your heart broken if you never develop feelings. You can’t be disappointed when you don’t have expectations. But eventually, my eating disorder came to the realization that the only way to fully protect me was to take me out completely. It viewed death as the ultimate protection. I don’t consider myself a pessimist, but I also don’t view myself as an optimist. I guess that just makes me a realist, but as much kindness as there is that exists in this world, there is also cruelty. In this world, there is more cruelty than kindness and I don’t believe my eating disorder will ever fully go away as a result. My eating disorder has always been a safety net filled with spikes, doing more harm than good no matter how pure its intentions.
I’m still fascinated by my eating disorder. I’ve always considered myself to be a smart individual, yet I was outsmarted at every turn by this thing. I wish there was a way to dissect it, take the parts from it that proved beneficial while discarding all the things that proved detrimental, but sadly it doesn’t work that way. There really is no conceivable way to turn the eating disorder into something resembling a business partner. Unfortunately, it will always just be a parasite.
I’m more than six months into recovery, but I’m by no means “recovered.” If anything, my recovery is still in its embryonic stage. Now that I’ve gotten back to a healthy state, the real recovery has begun. I find it cruel that in eating disorder recovery, your body still wants close to a year of sustained nutrition once you hit a healthy weight before it starts operating like normal once again. But there is no denying that I feel better mentally and physically. I no longer fear public gatherings because I’m comfortable with my appearance and I no longer feel like it’s a topic of conversation. I now feel confident to start applying for jobs and adding more structure into my day. Being healthy opens many windows of opportunity.
The question I get asked the most tends to be “what’s different this time around compared to all the others?” It’s a fair question because I have had recovery attempts in the past that started off promising but eventually crashed and burned. I guess there are a couple reasons.
For starters, dying from an eating disorder is extremely painful, both physically and mentally, but especially physically. Not that death is ever enjoyable, but dying from an eating disorder is the furthest thing from painless and peaceful as you’ll find in this world. You don’t simply go to bed one night and never wake up. That might eventually happen, but not after months or years worth of daily pain. Your bones ache every day. Your skin is pulled so tight over your bones that certain movements make it feel like your vital organs are being stabbed. Your legs feel like they have been set on fire every time you try and get out of a chair or walk up a flight of stairs. Nothing is painless. Everything is painful. Eventually, you find yourself praying for death because it feels like the only liberation from the pain. I could no longer tolerate that pain and knew I had only two options if I wanted the pain to go away: commit suicide or recover. I chose the latter, but to be honest, I gave a lot of thought to the other option.
Another reason I chose recovery is I could no longer overlook what my eating disorder was doing to my family. It was hard seeing how much they suffered despite doing everything in their power to help me. I would hear my mom get up around 6:30 a.m. most mornings and I thought it was just because she was a morning person. But eventually, I came to the realization that it was because she couldn’t sleep because her worry for me wouldn’t allow her to relax enough to drift off. Even though I wouldn’t have been around to see it, I knew my death would have crippled my family’s life forever. They wouldn’t ever be the same. They would have felt like it was their fault, and they would have shouldered that blame forever. They say time heals all wounds. It doesn’t heal that one. I’m glad my parents have been able to share in the joys of my recovery. It’s been great that I’ve healed, but it’s been even greater to see that they have healed with me.
Lastly, I didn’t want this to be my legacy. I didn’t want to die from this. When people mentioned my name, I didn’t want the response to be, “He’s the one that died from an eating disorder, right?” Even though I’m open about my struggles, I still feel a bit of shame about it, especially being a male. Eating disorders have become more nationally recognized as more famous celebrities have gone public with their struggles with the disease, but there will still be those that think of eating disorders as a “women’s disease.” The more I continue my recovery the more I find myself trying to distance myself from all things eating disorders. I like the small circles I’m apart of and don’t really see myself broadening my horizons. You probably won’t see me speaking at treatment facilities or conferences. You probably won’t see me going to Washington D.C. to speak with lawmakers. You probably won’t see me publishing a book about my journey. I’m content writing these blog posts and attending my peer support groups. I know I could use my experiences to help others in more ways, but I believe there are other people more passionate than me that can make a real difference. I’d gladly hand that baton over to them. I don’t want this to be my identity, but rather just a chapter in a book that gets published only in my head. For me, I want to return to sports writing. Writing these blogs has shown me I’m capable of the creativity that is required in the journalism field. When you’re malnourished, it’s near impossible to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) because the words just don’t come to your brain. What once took 10-15 minutes to write something took hours. But now I’m confident I can do it once more. Hockey has always been my favorite sport to cover since working for my college newspaper at Oswego State, so that’s where my next path leads. So, if anybody has any hockey connections (bonus points if it’s in Canada and double-bonus points if it’s in Toronto) let me know.
It’s still hard to believe my recovery journey has bypassed six months. I’ve come a long way. There’s still work to be done, but life has certainly improved. I spent my 32nd birthday (April 18) in the hospital. I’m happy to say that I spent my 33rd birthday with family and as far away from a hospital bed as possible. Six months ago, I didn’t even think I’d see 33, but now I see many more birthdays to come.
Mike Kraft