Doubt

My hard drive crashed on Saturday night. Being the brilliant person I am, I had not backed up any of my data, so I shelled out $560 to get it recovered and my useless old hard drive replaced, which took four days. Fortunately, all my data -- every last inconsequential yet invaluable photo, musing, and word of my autobiography -- was restored. I was lucky. Moral of the story: BACK UP YOUR SHIT.

No, seriously, do it now. This entry will still be here when you get back. There's even an online service that does it for you: Carbonite. Go do it.

Pressing onward: I never thought I'd be able to get through four days (in my current state) without the infinite resources of my computer/the internet to distract me from my anxiety, but in fact I managed quite well. I bought some magazines and a book of crossword puzzles, and I made sure to get out and socialize as much as my exhausted body would allow. And what do you know -- I made it.

Now there's the issue of having lost four days of research time for the massive annotated bibliography I have due next week, but the professor likes me and she said if I absolutely needed more time, I could get an extension. I'm glad she likes me. Our drastically divergent ideologies could easily encourage the opposite sentiment, but she seems to be quite fond of the fact that I can respectfully and confidently disagree with her.

Oh yeah, and I start slowly refeeding on Monday. Obviously, I'll be getting blood drawn every other day and such to watch out for refeeding syndrome, and my dietician has already instructed me how many calories to increase by every couple of days -- but when I told this to the doctor at the student health center, she said it was "highly inadvisable" for me to do refeeding without intensive inpatient supervision.

Look, lady: either I do the refeeding by myself, or I don't do the refeeding. I know you want me to spend money and time that I DON'T HAVE and thus alert my parents to the medical severity of my still-secret relapse, but that is entirely unfeasible. So stop trying to scare me, because it's only making me more anxious and panicked, and that can't be good for my heart, which you seem to be so worried about, now can it?

I won't deny that there are some minor medical issues I need to handle carefully. My heartbeat, while still regular, jumps close to 60 points between lying down and sitting, and my systolic BP drops by almost 20. Blood work is normal, aside from the fact that I'm dehydrated. Shocking. The lanugo has progressed to my stomach/chest. Again, it's not as dramatic as some cases, but it's definitely there. And definitely not attractive.

I want to get better, but all this talk of refeeding syndrome is really putting me in a nervous place. There's nothing I can do aside from do it on my own. I'm just really scared and frustrated right now.