Nothing to Lose

Chapter Five

My first meal in the dining room with the rest of the patients was lunch that day. Despite my hopes for an outdoor meal, I was instead herded into the small, rectangular room that was so orange it almost hurt your eyes. A long plastic table was dead in the center with our covered meal trays already carefully arranged on it, and there wasn't room for much else. In one corner was an eraseable white board with a hand drawn grid on it, lisiting each of our names with a symbol drawn next to it. Mine had a heart.

"Ooh, we need to change Maris's symbol!" Kaylee squealed as she raced towards the board, causing the older nurse (who'd detached herself from her cellphone) to give her a warning for 'unnecessary speed'. She erased the Valentine's heart and in its place drew a wheel, causing me to realize that heart meant bedrest, wheel meant wheelchair, and a stick person meant full mobility, which only Natalie had.

"Kaylee, refocus please. It's lunchtime." The nurse said as she pulled out a thick paper packet from a drawer in the tiny attached kitchen (which wasn't where our meals were prepared- it was only used for replacements and 'The Tube' prep).

"Calm down, June." Kaylee and her nurse, I'd later learn, speant an awful lot of time together. Kaylee was a 'Code Red', meaning she'd been caught exercising in the shower, and had all her privlidges revoked. June was nice enough, but I decided I'd rather go some time without exercise than being forced to have someone watch me shower. 

"Alright girls, you know the drill. Phones on the table." I didn't bother to point out that I did not, in fact, know the drill, and I complied reluctantly. Our cellphones were placed in a wicker basket in the center, where it would buzz or illuminate periodically throughout the meal. Our trays had little nametags with various cute animal stickers in what appeared to be a half-hearted attempt to cheer us up, and our plates were covered by a black dome that could etiher be percieved as ominous or fancy-restaurant-esque. I went with the former. As the days had passed my meals had grown exponentially, and each meal seemed harder to finish than the last. The hardest part about recovering from anorexia was the way our bodies now reacted to food. Our stomachs had physically shrunk, making eating physically excruciating along with the mental pain, and our metabolisms had skyrocketed as our bodies attempted to repair the damage we'd done. Meaning, sadly, that we needed more and more food to simply maintain our weight, and the hospital's job was to make us gain weight. You can imagine how many thousands of calories we were blowing through in a day.

Or perhaps you can't. For most of us, we knew exactly what was going into our mouths. We broke it down with a critical eye- peanut butter and jelly sandwhich. Okay, that means two slices of bread. Today it's whole wheat, so that's about 110 calories per slice, times two, that's 220 right off the bat. Peanut butter, probably a generous two tablespoons, so there's about 200 more. Jelly, there's another 75. The apple juice on the side was another 100, the soymilk was "Very Vanilla" today, so there goes another 130....it went on like that. Breaking down every bit of every meal, every snack, until all we saw were numbers. And that was just calories. We'd memorized the basic nutrition facts of nearly every food, and knew when to replace because the Ensure (the disgustingly chocolate weight gain shake) had less carbs, or fat, or whatever it was we feared in our PB&J.

Needless to say, mealtimes were exhausting.

Once we were all settled around the table, and firmly phone-less, June gave us the go ahead to reveal our meals. On my plate, resting on a bed of the mysterious mixture of grains known as 'Aztec Rice Blend', sat one of the most dreaded meals on rotation at the hospital. The 'Potato Burrito' was an odd combination of sweet potato, various spices, spinach wrap, and some unidentifiable crunchy vegetable that made the texture unbearable. Kaylee looked over at my plate and gave me an apologetic look. No one liked the 'Potato Burrito'. I sighed and looked at the massive side of lentil soup and peanut butter toast. Since I was on the vegetarian meal plan, I ate a lot of peanut butter. A lot. More than I ever thought possible. I decided to start with my beverages (two per meal- one juice, one soymilk), and stabbed my milk with a straw.

"Finished my apple juice." Stephanie said, pushing the box away from her. June nodded and checked it off in her booklet. I realized that the massive packet listed our meals and their replacement equivalents. I peered over her shoulder and took a look at what the pieces of my lunch were worth. If I replaced my burrito, it meant choking down two and a half cans of Ensure. The very thought of it made me more sick than the burrito, so I began dissecting it, as we all did. None of us ate normally here- it was almost a competition to see who could look more disgusted with the food. If you had a sandwhich, you'd open it up and cut it into tiny squares. If you had cereal with milk, you'd never mix them together, but instead eat them seperately. This was not a spoken rule, it just happened organically.

It was not the best day for me to have my first meal in the group, as it happened to be the day of the Corn Chowder Incident.

The Corn Chowder Incident was not a pretty sight. One minute it was the silence of each of us calculating our meals, the next it was June announcing that we had only ten minutes before the meal was up and we were forced to replace the remainder of our meals, and suddenly, it was Stephanie hyperventilating. I hadn't looked very closely at her meal until then- an unassuming black bowl that had once been steaming now held the room-temperature 'Corn Chowder', which had already been unappealing to begin with, but was now downright inedible, as it had formed a waxy film atop the surface. Somehow she had managed to consume half of it, but the remains would be difficult to force down for anyone.

"I can't do it." Stephanie choked, clenching her spoon so tightly her knuckles turned white. "It hurts so badly, June."

The rest of us, feeding off her anxiety, slowed our eating to a crawl. Lindsay began tapping her foot repeptatively, Kaylee tapped the table, and my hands flew to my hair, clawing at my scalp. The mood in the room, while it had never been cheery, took a sudden drop. Stephanie's shallow breathing, the beat of Kaylee and Lindsay's tapping, and the pounding behind my eyes was sending me spiraling into a full on panic attack. The room's flourescent lighting became unbearable, and I was staring at my plate so intensely it almost seemed to grow with the more attention I gave it. 

"Stephanie, if it's too hard, just replace it." June said.

"I can't June. I can't! I already ate half! I can't." Even if your meal was partially eaten, you had to replace the entirety of it- meaning double the calories. Just the idea of it made me uncomfortable. Kaylee's tapping got quicker.

Stephanie sobbed as she began choking down the waxy chowder, making gargling sounds I'd never heard out of a horror movie. The scene was so...crude. So inhumane. I glanced at the clock- only three minutes before I'd be forced to replace my burrito and grains. I shoveled the food into my mouth, but my stomach was already filled with butterflies. The nausea of stuffing myself only added to my building anxiety. The rest of the girls followed  suit, desperate to avoid the replacement. 

Stephanie finished after the rest of us, her spoon dragging against the bottom of the bowl being the final sound before silence engulfed the room once again. It was silent for only a moment before she began wretching- the chowder wouldn't stay down. She'd have to replace anyway. 

"Please no, June." She begged through her choking, whiping milky liquid from her lips, "I can't...I tried...please." But June was already preparing the Ensure while another nurse began cleaning up the mess. Kaylee threw her face in her hands and began crying, and Lindsay looked close to tears as well. The whole situation was akin to being forced to watch your worst nightmare unfold- a sick reminder that this was not a happy place for us to be. That we were in our own special hell. 

Stephanie never did drink her replacement, though.

She said The Tube hurt an awful lot.