Brave Girl Eating by Harriet Brown Page B

Seeing the shape of her ulna revealed against the white hospital sheet feels strangely pornographic, like seeing part of someone’s brain pulsing and exposed. It’s a reminder of my daughter’s vulnerability, and it feels unbearable, because there is nothing I can do to protect her from the thing that is eating away at her. And how ironic—she’s being eaten alive, literally, by the fear of eating.
    There is no privacy in the ICU; a glass wall separates us from the rest of the unit. I see the nurses filling out charts at the station, doctors hurrying back and forth. I see other parents with bloodshot eyes and ravaged faces. As night falls I sit, and I watch, and I wait for whatever will come next.

{ chapter two }
Home Again, Home Again
    Hunger is experienced not just in abdominal ache but as a heaviness in the limbs, a yearning in the mouth.
    â€”D REW L EDER , The Absent Body
    Five days later, Kitty is discharged from the hospital. I’m anxious about bringing her home, because as awful as the hospital has been, at least we weren’t alone with the anorexia there. It wasn’t just Jamie and me at the kitchen table, locked in mortal combat with our starving daughter. Kitty’s eating about a thousand calories a day now—not much, nowhere near enough, but probably twice as much as she was eating before the hospital. What will happen now that we’re going home again?
    On our way home we stop for groceries, the first of the nearlydaily shopping runs we’ll make over the next year. Kitty rests in the car with Jamie while I blow through the store at top speed. Just last week I wished I could shop without Kitty’s intrusive presence. Be careful what you wish for.
    As I steer the cart through the produce section, I’m reminded in a curious way of what it feels like to begin a diet: the special preparatory shopping trip, the sense of hopefulness undercut with past experiences of failure. The sense of wiping the slate clean. The feeling that this time, things will be different.
    Will they, though? I want to believe Kitty’s hospitalization will change things, though I don’t, yet, understand how. I can’t see my way from where we’ve been to where we need to go. And I’m a person who needs to be able to see the path ahead, to see what I’m up against and what I have to do, no matter how tough. Right now, not only is there no clear path, there’s no suggestion of one—just a seemingly infinite slog through the darkness that has swallowed up our daughter.
    If she was ill with something else—if she had diabetes, or pneumonia, or strep—her doctors would prescribe medicine, bed rest, fluids, and we would give her all those things. But this—this is like battling a many-headed monster in the dark. It’s like fighting darkness itself, a darkness that is inside my daughter, that’s somehow part of her. To fight it feels like fighting her .
    Dr. Beth has explained to us that we need to increase Kitty’s calories by about three hundred every couple of days. And that’s why I’m here, to prepare for the battles that are coming. I rip up my shopping list and any concept of a budget and speed-walk down the aisles, piling the cart with cookies, Muenster cheese, alfredo sauce, ranch dressing, buttery crackers, ice cream, potato chips, candy bars—all the foods Kitty used to love. Before anorexia, I didn’t buymuch processed, packaged food. I was a conscientious and health-conscious mother in twenty-first-century America, where we all understand the words healthy food to mean low-fat, low-calorie food, and not too much of it . Standing in front of the Pepperidge Farm display now, I have the sense that the world as I know it is tipping, elongating, growing as strange as an image in a funhouse mirror. I grab an armful of Milanos and keep going.
    At the far end of the store I stop at the shelves of high-protein and high-calorie