I was working with the physio more and more. I was proving to myself that I wouldn’t be held down by this whole thing. My sister was SnapChatting videos to our family. The morning of the rupture, one of my cousins had set up a family group. Now, my sister was using this to send videos to all of them of me walking about slowly, with and without the physio’s support.
Every day I was getting stronger. The strength in my hands was returning thanks to the stress ball exercises I was doing. The physio was happy that we had initiated it before meeting with her and made some suggestions. I was able to feed myself, write by hand and colour in (albeit passably staying inside the lines – but even as kid I had trouble with that particular skill. I was still being supported to walk to the bathroom, but where I had two nurses with me, I now had one, ready to assist if she felt I was faltering, or to remind me to go slow and not rush myself when walking. I was also doing occasional laps of the HDU with a nurse supporting me to keep away the boredom when no one was visiting me.
There began to me talk about me returning to Ballarat the following week if I continued to progress, and if there was no set backs over the coming weekend. Hearing that spurned me on. I mean, I knew that I’d be going back to the hospital and not home, but at that stage, I was willing to take it if it meant being closer to home.
By the end of the week, I was even transferring myself out of the bed and into the chair next to the bed without a nurse assisting me. I took it easy each time, but knowing that I could do it, made me feel like I was progressing. I got told off a few times by the nursing staff for not waiting for them, but after a while, when they’d observed me doing it, they saw I was trying to do it safely and wasn’t pushing myself to do more than I could. I was in the chair for all my meals and then I was usually back on the bed.
On the Friday, I was asked to hop on the scales. Apparently they should have asked me to do it earlier on in my admission, but no one had gotten around to asking me to do so.
I’ve had a blurry relationship with my weight. In high school, I was monitoring, recording and obsessing over every fluctuation. It got to the point where I would weigh myself first thing in the morning and before I went to bed. In hindsight, I blame reading (and re-reading Bridget Jones’ Diary) for putting the idea into my mind that this was a healthy approach. When I left for uni, I got a better appreciation of both my body and my weight, only stepping on to the scales when I went home for holidays.
I had a vague notion of where my weight was at. I think I was at 93kgs, maybe pushing 94 or 95 depending on pre-PMS weight fluctuations. When I got off the scale and the nurse looked at me and said 88kgs, well, I was a little shocked to say the least. I hadn’t been under 90 in over a year (when I’d weighed myself maybe twice in the last twelve months). Then I rationalised the loss in my mind. On Friday when the aneuyrysm blew, I threw up all the food that I had eaten (possibly since lunch the day before). On Saturday I didn’t eat, I was too busy sleeping. On Sunday, food was second priority to surgery so it didn’t happen. Then on Monday, I was sleeping and didn’t eat much. On Tuesday I ate a little soup, but not much because I couldn’t use the spoon properly. By the time I actually felt like eating, I was only really doing so at meals, and not snacking like I usually would.
The nurse recorded it, and I expressed my surprise at the figure that the scales had shown. He told me to ‘take the loss’ and the usual trope of ‘any loss is a good loss’. I looked at him. I know he had meant it to be kind, but I shook my head. Growing up in the 90s, eating disorders appeared to be everywhere – advertising (hidden in images of models that were such thinness that the average person couldn’t hope to achieve), after school specials and that kind of thing. So, when the nurse said what he did, I realised just how far I had come. I could recognise the difference between a good weight loss and a bad one, and recognise that, for teenage me, I would have taken this information to extreme if someone had said it to me back then.