and then we came to the end of all things. (and a message to haters who comment)

PRIMUM NON NOCERE

6 years of blood, sweat and tears (all literal) boiled down to one moment that was over in a flash, but also seemed to last a lifetime. I almost cried when I took the Hippocratic Oath. I blew my family a kiss as I walked across the stage. My feet felt like death on daggers in my heels, but I felt amazing. 

It got me thinking, what does this mean for me? I have been heckled, time and again online for writing this blog, with my background. Does it mean I cannot be a good doctor? Does it mean I am a danger? Does it mean I should know better? No, no and yes. Yes. I should know better. But then again, none of us wandered down this path thinking that we would be glamazons. We all know what lies ahead of us or with us. 

And, to make it clear to any of my harshest and most vocal critics, DO NOT THINK I CHOOSE TO BE HERE. I found myself here. Maybe it didn't creep up on me, and maybe I did see it coming but I didn't wish for it and when I saw it coming, I feared it. And now that I am here, I will do everything in my power to prevent another girl from ending up here. This is not somewhere anyone should be. It's the 7th level in Dante's Inferno, we're down here, freezing with the devils in our heads who tell us every second, of every day that we are fat, ugly and totally undesirable. 

Maybe I should have done something about it sooner. But in the same way that deer freeze in headlights, I froze. I was too ashamed to go for help, and now I am too ashamed to go because I don't look thin enough to need help, and I am far too old. You may say that I am resigned to my fate. I see it as embracing the inevitable and trying to do the most good with whatever time I have left. 

Having an eating disorder doesn't make me a bad doctor, nor does it make me a danger. Surrounded by other doctors, they would drag me kicking and screaming to recovery before I became either of those things. 

I hate it when I am judged online by people who have only read one post of mine, and already think I will be a bad doctor. 

There are people in my class with substance abuse issues, there are people in my class who have attempted suicide (and one who succeeded), there are people who are alcoholics, there are people who sleep around like you wouldn't believe, there are others with eating disorders, anger issues and relationship issues, people who are racist, sexist and worst of all, people who are only in it for the money. So don't tell me I'm going to be a bad doctor. We all have our demons, but they are ours, and I'd like to think that most of us would rather take a bullet than let it interfere with patient care. 

All it means is that I can probably spot an eating disorder before most, and it gives me patience. I understand when patients don't listen to advice because it stops them getting what they want. I understand when they try their best but can't seem to succeed. I can spot the lies, but I do not hate them for lying to me. I totally get it. 

Yes, I know I am expected to be super human. I am not supposed to have problems, I am not supposed to have issues, I am not supposed to forget things, I am supposed to be always happy, cheerful, full of wisdom and I am supposed to take all the racist and sexist abuse that patients hurl at me with a large tub of salt and smile and love them like all the other patients. I am supposed to have a wonderful boyfriend, a perfect family, no debt and perfect teeth. I am supposed to be an angel of life. I am none of those things. I'm just a normal girl, with my own demons, trying to do my best. 

I will probably battle my eating disorder until I die. But why should I be greeted with such hate and disgust, why me and not the patient with heart disease because they ate too much? Why me and not the patient with lung cancer because they wouldn't quit smoking? Why me and not the schizophrenic who stabbed his own father? Why does my profession mean that I am not allowed to have a disease?

I wish people would remember that while being in hospital might be a once in a lifetime thing for them, I have 60 patients, 60 patients that change every day. Much as I would love to, I cannot devote a full day to one patient, and all I can do is my best. I am only human, but I shall, like all my colleagues, do my best to be more than that.

They say that you are not a real physician until you have killed a few patients. And that is what they told us on the first day of medical school. So I will enter the killing fields on Monday. Hope to never see you on the frontline, my friends. 

I have old lady hips

"Love is like a bomb, baby, come on get it on!"

I'm exhausted on several levels. Just back from an awesome trip to Hong Kong. Went to Disneyland for the first time in my almost 23 years of life. It was just as magical as I thought it would be! I bought the Minnie Mouse ears and rode the Cinderella Carousel and I've never been happier in my life. 

Made myself a playlist of old rock music on the flight (which is what inspired the opening line) and listened to it for 6 hours. After listening to ACDC and Def Leppard and Black Sabbath and Guns'n'Roses and Queen and all of that, I just thought 'what's happened to music?'

Justin Bieber and Nicki Minaj and One Direction just doesn't seem to measure up. I had a great time just bathing in good music. Food wasn't so much a problem, I walked all day, everyday and didn't stuff my face like I thought I would. Still, I am constipated and I have a food baby so I'm too scared to weigh myself. All in all I think I'm pretty much the same as when I left. I'm desperately hoping to lose weight when I start work in a week's time. 

After 3 straight days of walking and a miserable 10 hour flight with lots of tossing and turning, my right hip feels terrifically unstable. Like it's going to dislocate at any moment. And my back is aching. I'm not yet 23 and my body is already falling apart. Sometimes I tell myself that it's because I'm so lazy and fat that it's too heavy for me to carry around. 

Hip and back troubles. I'm such an old lady. All I need is some gin and some stairs and then the transformation will be complete. I have no idea how I am going to walk up stairs, across a stage and down stairs tomorrow in towering platform stilettos but I shall definitely let you know if I end up face planting in front of my entire class. 

Meanwhile I am preparing myself for work and for impending weight loss. Hoping that my too small clothes will finally fit me! I would love to have clothes hang off me. Everything feels too fat. Makes me wonder if I will ever feel skinny? I don't even know what it might feel like to be skinny. Does it feel glorious? Does it feel better than sex? Does it feel better than the taste of hot buttered toast with clotted cream and jam? 

ice queen at the ball

"And your heart is a stone buried underneath your pretty clothes."

Disclaimer: I'm a wee bit tipsy at the time of writing this post.

Cinderella at the ball, that's what SPM calls me. Cinderella with her glass slippers and Prince Charming and pumpkin carriage. I don't think I'll ever feel like that. My shoes were killing me by the end of the night and I wasn't about to take them off and go barefoot on the alcohol soaked dance floor. 

And I had to be on the dance floor to soak up all the calories that I ate. I left half my dinner, but it still felt like too much. 

Dinner is finished and most people are dancing. I'm sitting with Rich. Sitting, in the loosest sense of the word. We are sort of on chairs, I'm lying on him mostly, one of his hands is squeezing my left boob and his other hand is sliding up and down my thighs. His lips are glued to my neck when we're not whispering to each other. And no, I haven't had a complete turn around in my personality, he's only allowed to do that stuff to me because he's gay. He's my gay best friend and we are whispering about his boyfriend. 

He's telling me about how much he loves my boobs and my legs and how one day I will make some guy very happy. It's obvious he's just started having sex and now wants everyone to experience it. The sentiment is rather sweet but the thought of it makes me ill. 

There are a few guys trying to get close to me but I give them a look. Apparently that look of mine is infamous and it makes guys cower. None of them are allowed to touch me, but they still try. I'm pretty cold to them. I hate them. Nothing sickens me more than the thought of men grabbing all my fat. It makes me feel so disgusting. 

Everything about the night makes me feel fat. The food, the champagne, my tight dress and my skinny friends. 

"You're getting too skinny," Rich whispers in my as he squeezes the fat on my thighs. "Don't lose any more weight, you are skinny enough." I imagine how skinny I'd be if I hadn't lived with German guys who force fed me. Fucking hot German guys who I would've happily fucked if I had ever been drunk enough. 

How did I ever get to this point, almost 23 and never had a boyfriend, never been kissed, let alone have sex. Being felt up by my gay best friend is the most sexual experience I've ever had. Another one of my guy friends is trying to get at me. He's got his arms around me whenever he is around and nuzzles into my neck. I'm not flattered. I know how blind drunk he is. Blind being the operative word. 

All in all it was a night of binge drinking, beautiful shoes (but painful feet) and more male attention than I've ever had. Still, fat was everywhere. 

Stupid fat. Literally gets in the way. 

knowledge is power

"We give and take a little more, the eternal game of tug and war. Power and control."

The endless pit that is my stomach rumbles shamelessly and the noise seems to echo through my ears. I'm convinced that the whole room can hear it. Ramming my fist into my abdomen in a vain attempt to curb the sound, I stubbornly continue to flick through my stack of x-rays. It's a test and a woman stands over my shoulder, listening to my every word. It is the final test, in many ways I am already qualified. 

The words spill from my mouth in such rapid succession that my fellow clinicians look concerned. I'm so mechanical in this, I barely know what I'm saying myself, my voice sounds like a far away drone and in my state, the words mean nothing. "PA erect chest x-ray of an elderly female patient of good penetration and minimal rotation. There are no obvious bony defects or soft tissue swellings. Gross cardiomegaly is present with increased interstitial markings, blunting of both costophrenic angles and septal lines. There is peribronchial cuffing in both lungs as well as upper lobe diversion. All of this is consistent with congestive heart failure."

The woman behind me nods and moves onto the person next to me. I release a breath that I didn't know I was holding. I'm done. Next time I walk into a hospital, I won't be a student anymore. Fully qualified, holding lives in my hands. I think back to the first lecture I ever had at medical school. The opening line of this lecture was "as doctors, you will all kill patients. Hopefully none of you will do it deliberately. This is something you have to accept now or you will have a hard time." I don't know if I've ever come to terms with this. It scares me to the bone. 

I try not to think about it. Try to get on with what I need to do. 

"Oh my gosh, you're so thin!" But I'm not. Most of the other girls have lost much more weight than me. In England, I got down to almost 50kg. Then I got back up to 57kg. I think I'm hovering around 54kg to 55kg now. I have lost a bit of weight since I got home and away from that recovery house. I can feel that I'm thinner, but nowhere near as thin as I was when I was in England. Not as thin as I was when I was in control of my own food. 

But this just goes to show that I can do it. I can lose a lot of weight very quickly. I can also put it back on very quickly, but I can lose it, and that's a relief to know. A little discipline is all I need. And it does come off. I had the faintest of thigh gaps for a while there. So it's possible. Now all I have to do is to get back there as fast as I can. 

Tune out the hunger, it means nothing. Tune out the headaches. It means nothing. It's so simple when you boil it right down. At the be all and end all of any conversation, when I don't eat, I lose weight. So if I want to lose weight, all I have to do is not eat. It's very, very simple. 

the german boys.

"So we're back here again, tip-toeing around the edge of the end."

Back at home, lying in bed, using internet and jetlagged as all hell. I'm too scared to even weight myself because I know that I am still fat. I have gained weight. Thanks to stupid and amazingly hot German bloke I lived with. But now I am home, away from that dratted recovery house and things will be back on my terms thank you very much. 

It feels strange to be at home, it feels as though I never left. This trip hasn't changed me at all. I feel the same about myself. It is so easy to pick up the strands that I dropped 2 months ago. 

I need to go back to the professor at some point in time. And I can already feel the anxiety rising in my chest just thinking about it. The old illness rising, the old emotions awakening.

Work looms. I am looking forward to it simply because of the weight loss potential there. No matter what happens in my life, weight loss is still the only thing that I crave. 

My weight is really holding me back. And I realised this while I was in the UK. The first German guy I lived with, Chris, was the one to start force feeding me. Even though I hated him for this, I absolutely adored him. He was cute, he was extremely nice and we ran on the same wavelengths. We used to go on long walks together, go explore the city together and he always had an umbrella to hold over me when it started raining. He would kill spiders for me even though I knew he was terrified of them too. I missed him so much when he left.

I'm terrible at reading what a guy thinks of me, but by the end of our 5 weeks together, I knew he liked me, and I knew by the end of the 3rd week that if I wanted him, I could have got him. But I couldn't try. I couldn't bear the thought of him touching me even though I wanted nothing more, and feeling all the fat on my body. I started to push him away in the last week. I wouldn't go to any of his dinner invitations, wouldn't go out clubbing with him. He was really upset with me in the end. 

He still messages me on facebook. And I feel terrible each time I hear from him. 

Andreas, the second guy, was very different, although he was the one who fed me the most. He made me feel even worse about myself. Andy is one of the best looking guys I've ever seen in my life and I hated being in the same room as him. I felt I was far too fat and ugly for him to even look at me and that is something that I just couldn't get past. 

I remember the first time I saw him. I'm sure he could see the physical response I had to first seeing him. I stopped what I was doing, my eyes bulged, my jaw dropped and I became extremely flushed. He is just so good looking. Deadly charismatic, but not charming in the way that Chris was. Maybe I say that because Chris was trying to get to me, and Andy wasn't. 

I wonder how things would have turned out if I had been thin. Would I have gone out with Chris? Would I have talked to Andy more? 

But does that matter, because I am fat and I didn't do any of those things. 

do you know this house is falling apart

"We've got no money but we've got hearts."

All my hard earned progress, each pound fought for, all in vain. Stupid, stupid doctors. Stupid doctors. 

For the past 3 weeks my house here in England has turned into a recovery unit. A recovery unit with one patient. Me. It sucks. I'm back to where I started. Right back to where I started. All that exercise and restricting, for nothing. It's all back on. This is what happens when you live with doctors. 

You can't hide anything. You can't run away. They don't listen to any of my excuses, we all know we've heard them before from those conniving anorexics in our inpatient psychiatric units. 

I don't know what to do. They are strangers to me. Poor students, poor students with no money. Poor medical students who are forcing me to eat. I have absolutely no food in the house. It's one of my ways of restricting. If there is no food, I can't eat. And I'm generally too lazy to go out and buy food when I'm starving. 

But that's no barrier, they give me their food. Well, he does anyway. He cooks for me, caesar salad with chicken, pasta with prawn and whiskey and cream sauce, baked potato with tuna. Out of his own pocket he is buying each pound I put on. And I can't say no. When someone that good looking cooks a meal that smells so good it makes me salivate as I sit, defeated at the kitchen table, and puts it down in front of me as he sits opposite, eating his own portion and watching me eat. 

There are no weigh ins at this house, thankfully. But they can see the weight going on. I can see the weight going on. He might only see me for dinner, but he makes damn sure there are enough calories in it for me to put on weight.

After dinner, he breaks out the chocolate, or ice cream, or both. It doesn't matter when I come home. He's there, waiting, with dinner and dessert. 

Part of me hates him to the very core. Part of me is torn because he is after all one of the best looking guys I have ever seen and I want to make him happy. What the fuck is happening to me. 

But there is still one fact that I can hold onto. 2 and a half more weeks of this and I'll be gone, away from him, half a world away from him. And then, just you watch. 

sugars, I'm going down!

Skinny...all the voices screaming....skinny. 

Well, I've been back here for all of one day and I'm already extremely glad that I'm back. I have so missed the support and the communication and being able to let my ED voice scream as much as it wants to. 

Wanted to let you all know that I am now 51.5kg. Going down! Going in the right direction! Faster than I had ever hoped for! 51.5kg!!!!!! I'm only 1.5kg away from 50kg which is a weight I've never been at before. In fact, what I weigh now is the lowest I've ever been. I have never been this low before and babes, I'm so not stopping here.

I couldn't sleep last night. Part of it was because of the 2 day hangover I have inflicted upon myself after drinking my own body weight in whiskey in Scotland over the weekend. The other part of it was because I was up for hours, feeling my bones. I have never been able to feel so many ribs. And even though none of my bones really stick out, I know they are closer to sticking out. 

One step closer! I'm going to keep this up, this is too good to let go. I haven't felt so happy for such a long time. Nothing, NOTHING compares to the joy of losing another pound, another kilo. 

I'm still not convinced I see much of a difference. But I have no full length mirror. Oh, and another thing. The bottom of my thighs no longer touch each other. It's not a massive step, because what really counts is when the top of your thighs don't touch. But for me, this is a sign that things are going well. The bottom of my thighs don't touch, even when my knees are touching. I'm loving this. 

For the first time in a long time I believe that I will get there one day. And now I see that when I start work at the end of this year, the weight loss will just continue. 

I love you all so much! And hold onto it, just hold on. Because even though things might seem terrible, joy will come with the promise of another pound off. I was once so down in the dumps, but now that I'm losing weight again, I'm so happy. I'm not even trying to hide it. I want people to see that I've lost weight. 

If nobody notices my weight loss when I get home, I will be seriously disappointed. But I have another 4 weeks to make it more obvious. And I will.