My Heart Will Go On

It's so unbelievably easy to hate your body, whether you have an eating disorder or not. Looking in a mirror is a constant reminder that there is always something you want to fix. Your hips are too big, your stomach isn't flat enough, your arms are flabby, your face is chubby, the list goes on and on. For most of my life, my body has been my enemy. It's been something that I just didn't appreciate and didn't understand why it couldn't look and feel the way I wanted it to. It took me 8 years, a round of treatment, 8 million blood tests, 45 echo tests, and 1 million EKG's for me to find out that I was the enemy to my body, not the other way around.

When my heart decided that it couldn't take anymore and was giving out more and more every day, I was reminded by how amazing this body of mine actually is and continues to be. For 8 years, my body was destroyed by my lack of care for it. The lack of nutrients, the over-exercise, the constant hate I had for it. And my body just took it. I would tell myself I'm disgusting, and my body was like, "She doesn't mean it, keep going." But at some point, my body realized it COULDN'T keep going, no matter how hard it tried. I had seemed to have forgotten for the last 8 years that my body was a part of me. Like I can't just destroy this body, and go to the body store, and get a new body. This was what ultimately led me to treatment, to see how much damage I actually did, and to see if there was any way I could salvage it.

It's a known fact that eating disorders can cause severe damage to your heart. But coming into treatment with already having a congenital heart defect made me more susceptible to the eating disorder taking my life. That's super freaky and dark to type, but It's the ugly truth (credit to Katherine Heigl and Gerard butler who starred in that classic 2009 romcom). The whole reason I wanted to get better was so that my heart could keep going, and I spent every waking day in treatment, at home, out with friends trying to give it the care it deserved.

Sometimes I forget that treatment isn't a one and done fix for your organs. I found that out the hard way this week. Very early Tuesday morning, I started having severe pain in my chest, and my left arm was numb. I knew something was wrong and that I had to go to the ER. I hadn't felt this pain in such a long time, and I feared that all of the hard work I had done over the last year meant nothing.

I called an uber and went to the hospital. Because of the severity of my pain and it being in my chest, they took me right away. They immediately ran tests to ensure it wasn't a heart attack or stroke, and thank GOD, it wasn't either of those. My EKG was abnormal, having a fast heart rate. They told me I was stable and could go home, but would need to see my cardiologist so they could do more specialized tests to ensure everything was OK.

I saw my cardiologist later that day who told me that I wasn't getting enough oxygen to my heart. In addition to that, fluid had been building up in my chest. Combined with back pain and chest pain, the cardiologists decided to treat me for pneumonia. All of these things have happened to me before so I wasn't terribly shocked, just upset that it's still happening after all the work I put in. The very, very sweet nurse then reminded me that my congenital heart defect will always be a part of me, and that's OK. The fact that I continue to work to get better is why I'll be able to heal faster when something like this happens to me, and she was absolutely correct. Its been about 30 hours since the incident, and although I feel weak and tired, I can tell it's getting better, and the recovery process feels so much easier than it would've felt a year ago. And thank God for that, because I haven't left my apartment in 2 days, and I've started having conversations with the characters of Harry Potter because that and 90's romcoms are all that I've been watching.

So yes, having a defective heart isn't ideal, and a lot of pain comes with it, but I couldn't be more grateful for what this body of mine has fought off, has accomplished, and has dealt with all these years. The theme from "Titanic" says it best, "My heart will go on. You ain't dyin, lady." I may have paraphrased those lines a bit.