I’m going to start off by saying that it is very hard to talk about or to the new girl, Lisa. Heck, its hard to just look at her. She is tall with chin-length brown hair, brown eyes, dainty fingers, a slow speaking voice, and she is nothing. There is nothing to her. Her thin translucent skin stretches over each and every curve of bone to give pure definition to the movements of skeletal structure. By the laws of science and human anatomy its a miracle that shes breathing, let alone standing up, and thats something she can’t seem to stop doing. Lisa is a self-admitted exercise addict as well as anorexic and she is never just sitting. She is either asleep or walking around.

Lisa has been living in Seattle up until recently when she moved to New York to start law school. After only a week of classes she gave in and made the critical decision to come here and, for her, at 29, its not the first time in treatment. One of the scariest things is that one of her previous treatments was this program which she left, at a healthy weight, just last January. Thankfully she knows, at least on some level, that she needs to be here. Although I don’t know what her mindset was like before, at this point shes vocally appalled at herself for having fallen down that familiar rabbit hole again and so quickly.

I look at Lisa and see the sickest thinnest (at this point the two words are interchangeable, so take your pick) person I have ever seen in my life. At Remuda, someone thinner than me coming into the program, was triggering. Here, at Columbia, all it does is scare the pants off me. I had been so close to that myself, definitely mentally, if not physically. I was too close for comfort to being so entirely lost. I can’t express how glad I am to be given the chance to find my life again. (Big sigh of relief from a set of working lungs now.)

Right now Lisa is settled into the quiet room. Its the same room I was in when I first got here. For me it was just transitional, until another room opened up, but for Lisa its for medical surveillance reasons. She is deemed critically unstable and has the orders, for the moment, to do only 2 things – eat and sleep. Above it all though, no matter how she looks or how slow and disjointed her speech may be, her mindset of recovery seems to be in the right place. She is eating 100% so far and comes off outwardly positive. We’ll have to see what the next few weeks bring but I do, emphatically, hope the best for her.