When I was being treated for anorexia at the health services at my college, they made me turn around on the scale during my appointments so I couldn’t see the number on it. I had no idea how much I weighed. My doctor’s office also didn’t have a mirror, so I couldn’t look at myself there. But no matter. I’d go back to my dorm room and catch a glimpse of my rotund form in my own, floor-length mirror, and I would try not to hate what I saw. I would hate it, anyway.
“I hope you know that we are just trying to help you.”
My doctor sat in front of her computer, while I sat just off to the side. My arm was still in the sling from the accident I had suffered a couple of weeks before, and I was thinking about that instead of listening to my doctor. I thought about the patch of ice that had been in the way of my morning run, how, instead of going around it, I had run right over it. In the middle, my feet gave out and I went flying. I ended up with a fractured left elbow, my arm now in a sling that severely limited my range of motion.
“Sorry,” I said to my doctor, snapping back to attention. With my thoughts straying to my accident, I hadn’t heard what she had said.
“I hope you know that we are just trying to help you,” she repeated. “It’s possible that, because you haven’t been eating enough, your bones are brittle. That could have been one of the reasons you fractured your elbow. How have things been going with the nutritionist?”
I shrugged my shoulders, fiddling with my fingers in my lap, unable to look my doctor in the eyes.
“She says I need to put on fifteen more pounds before I can run again.”
“In time for the Boston Marathon, right?”
I shrugged again, still looking down.
“Guess so.”
“And you’re not running or exercising right now?”
I shook my head.
“My balance would be off anyway if I did,” I said.
My doctor stared at me as if to determine not whether I was lying, but to what degree. I looked up at her and tried to reassure her with an innocent look.
“You’re going to have to be extra careful walking the streets,” she said, “so you don’t fall again and reinjure yourself, or break something else. This is Cambridge, after all, capital of snow and slush and ice. Promise me you’ll take the nutritionist’s advice to heart. Have a cookie with dinner or something. Don’t just eat salad.”
“How much weight have I put on?”
I just had to know. I weighed in at eighty-two pounds on my first visit, and since then they always turned me around on the scale so I couldn’t see what my weight was. I wished my doctor would just tell me.
“You really don’t need to worry about that,” she said, looking back at the computer. She typed something in, silent for a moment, then looked back at me.
“You know,” she said, “you’re such a beautiful young lady, and if we lost you, or if any other bad things happened to you because of your illness – I’m allowed to call anorexia an illness now, and I want you to consider it in that light for a while – I would feel very very bad and also personally responsible. You don’t want me to have to feel bad about myself because my star patient had something terrible happen to her, now would you?”
I cocked my head to the side. It was a roundabout way of getting at the matter, but then my doctor was clever.
“I don’t connect my wellbeing with your personal sense of fulfillment,” I said.
“Oh, well,” my doctor said, turning toward me, sighing deeply and laying a hand on the computer table. “I think it’s also about feeling good about yourself and what you have to contribute. Besides, as I said, your bones may be fragile because of all this dieting you’ve been doing. I’m going to send you for a bone density test. You don’t want to end up with a hump from kyphosis by the time you’re twenty-seven, do you?”
This, more than anything the doctor had said up to then, made me perk up and listen.
“What?” A mental picture was forming itself, of me in my twenties with a hump on my back.
“Yes,” my doctor said. “I’m going to order a test for you at Mount Auburn Hospital. That will show us a little better what we’re dealing with, to see what your bones are like.”
“What my bones are like?” I asked, still stunned. My mouth was open a little as I waited for my doctor’s response.
“This really is no joke,” my doctor said. “I think you don’t fully realize how important it is that you get out of this illness.”
A hump at twenty-seven? Surely things weren’t that dire. She must be making a joke to scare me into cooperating.
“Go for the test,” my doctor said, getting up from her chair in front of the computer. “Put on those fifteen pounds, and then you can run as much as you want to. Just not over sheer patches of ice.”
With that, she left, giving me some privacy to get out of my blue paper gown and back into my normal clothes. As I put on my clothes awkwardly because of the sling, I pondered what she had said. Osteoporotic kyphosis at twenty-seven? There was no way.
Before I left the room, I glanced over at the scale. I looked at it for a long time, letting the thoughts churn in my mind. Thinning bones? A hump at twenty-seven? It gave me chills. Yet, I just needed to step on the scale to know how far from ultimate perfection I was.
Instead, I draped my coat back over myself and left the office.
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