Diabulimia -- My Story

I awoke in the middle of the night and I felt just sick. I knew I needed insulin but I had to use the bathroom and I needed something to drink and I couldn't figure out which one needed to happen first because I felt everything so intensely. I just kept trying to tell myself not to throw up; but that didn't work.

My mom eventually found me in the bathroom and by then I was too sick to move. I remember her carrying me down the stairs and putting me in the car.

The first time it happened it was easy to put blame into other things: My parents had gotten divorced two weeks earlier, it was the first night in my "new" house, I had forgotten my long-acting insulin, I had just completed 8th grade and was stressed out about starting high school -- the list just kept going.

After four days my doctors sent me to a psychiatric hospital, but I was only there for four more days because "diabulimia" didn't have a name and no one understood what was happening. Plus psychiatric hospitals aren't really equipped to deal with eating disorders, so basically they found nothing wrong with me.

My next DKA was a month later... so much for a nothing wrong with me.

Then high school started. I just began to believe that to be loved I had to be thin.

For a while people were amazed by the amount of food I ate because I was so small. But then my friends started to get suspicious. Every time after I ate I had to use the bathroom, so they begin to follow me to the bathroom, thinking I was bulimic. But I passed their tests -- I really only had to use the bathroom because my blood sugar was high and I always had ketones.

Then in November I was in DKA again. I missed Thanksgiving and was sent to the same psychiatric hospital, but this time I had to stay there until January. I don't really think that the stay there was helpful (and neither do my parents anymore), but there was something that happened while I was there that will stay with me forever.

There was another diabetic staying in the same hospital. I'm going to call him "Sam" for privacy reasons. Sam had been in and out of hospitals for years and had been in a few comas. His reason was that he was a foster kid and to get out of foster homes he didn't like, he'd go into DKA.

Then one day he and his roommate "escaped" from the hospital. I was very scared for Sam because I knew he didn't have his insulin.

Sadly my fears came true: on December 10, 2004, my friend was admitted into the ER and died that morning from DKA. The last words he ever said to me were "They say all these DKAs are going to kill us, but I don't think that's really true."

After that stay I told myself I would never skip my insulin again.

But when I went back to school that changed.

You see, while in the hospital I had gained a lot of weight. I was actually healthy-looking, but I thought I was obscenely overweight.