One of my part-time jobs when I was younger was with the school board. That's where I met "W", who was a guidance counseller at one of the high-schools. I'll call her Jane for the duration of the blog.
There was no hiding my problem at the time. I was 83 pounds; I know that as I weighed myself everytime I used the washroom. I had been told that I'd risk death when I hit 90 pounds. Yet, here I was---doing maintenance and working hard for eight hours a day. What did the doctors know, I thought. People with eating disorders can often spot each other and I knew that there was something up with Jane. She wasn't all that thin, but there is still that vibe. She was always on her bike and had a very driven, manic quality about her.
Jane and I started to talk and we soon realized that we had a lot in common. She'd been very ill years earlier, but had gained weight. While she looked healthier, she was still slim and certainly not recovered. Like many people with eating disorders, she passed. Jane was what some people might call an exercise bulimic. If she ate too much she would spend hours on her bike. Eating too much was anything beyond her diet of Metamuicil and Cup-of-Soup.
She told me briefly of some abuse and neglect in her childhood. I didn't push it as I could tell she didn't want to say more. Her face was cherubic and always smiling. It hid so well all of the turmoil within. Jane had a fantastic rapport with the students.
At the time there was no treatment in that small town for eating disorders. The doctors had no clue. A person could spiral out of control for a very long time.
When I left the job and returned to school I would talk to Jane every once in a while. After I graduated university and started working I got a call from her. She was desperate. One of the students had a bad eating disorder and her parents were refusing to see it. The girl could not talk to her family doctor as he'd probably disclose all to her family. There wasn't a crisis centre available in the town at the time and even if there had been, no sixteen year old would call in there. Her family was very religious and psychiatry did not correspond to their beliefs. Jane was stymied; she couldn't cross boundaries and share too much with the girl nor could she see her outside of school hours too often.
Jane had a proposition. According to the experts, I was headed down the road to recovery. After all, I had gained weight. I had a new job in a nontraditional one for women and I had to meet a standard of physical fitness to do so. Would I be willing to take calls from this girl and listen to her? Without realizing it, Jane was setting up a peer support network.
It was a hard choice as, had her parents found out and made a fuss, I would have been fired. My job had a strong code of conduct and it could have looked bad. After all, who was I to help their daughter? But, nobody else was doing it either. So, I agreed and for a while she would phone me up and I would mostly listen. She did not know who I was, nor did I know her. I was a number that she could call.
After a while my commute became too hard and I had to move. The shift work made it impossible for me to continue to take the calls, but when I ran into Jane years later I heard that the girl was doing okay.
I've not heard from Jane in about ten years. I think of her when people start on rants about school teachers and counsellors not doing enough. Sometimes, they are the only people willing to step up to the plate; even at great risk to themselves. I hope that Jane is doing well, but my last sighting of her indicated that she had seemed to have slipped back into starvation.
No comments:
Post a Comment