May 2012

Hi All, So, it’s been a while. Again. I haven’t been doing much, obviously, but I did have some plans when I first came to live with my aunt. First of all, I wanted to loose some weight. Not loads, just enough that I could walk again. Then I wanted to walk around the garden, get my strength up and be able to go out. Nowhere in particular, just out. It’s been about 3 years since I’ve been out for anything other than a hospital visit and I’m dying inside just to do something with my life. I am still totally ruled by food and rather than loosing any weight, I have put some on. I haven’t been weighed since I was 50 stone and I’ve turned my back on medical help and the idea of a gastric band. However I know I’ve grown. When I was first here, even though I was weak from months of doing nothing and heart problems, I was able to stand long enough to waddle to the bathroom. I needed help getting up but I could at least move. Since a while before Christmas last year, I haven’t been able to move at all. My aunt, bless her, has taken to caring for me. She was used to looking after my gran when she was too big and old to look after herself, and she’s warmed to having me around. She takes care of me in ways that I hoped no-one would ever have to do. The basic set up of my room is that my bed is in fact 2 double beds, side by side. They’re held together by bolts (they’re the kind of beds that screw into walls so they’ve got flat panels on all sides). I can shuffle myself from one bed to the other, which, even though one leg always spills onto the other bed, allows my aunt to change the sheets. I have incontinence pads under me which she changes as and when I need it done. In order to let her change them, I roll onto my side. She cleans me each time with a wet towel and honestly, it’s the most shameful and embarrassing thing I’ve ever gone through, and it happens every day. She’s so nice about it, and never, not even after cleaning up a huge 5 pound turd, does she ever tell me to get my act together. I watch Sky+ and play my xbox during the day. That’s pretty much it. I avoid facebook, my friends all think I’m suffering some kind of illness and I don’t want them to know the truth. I haven’t been outside since I got here, so the only daylight I get is from the window across the room. I have a big TV, so that’s something. Because of my lack of activity, my body has really suffered. My back aches all the time, literally, all the fucking time. My breasts sag either side of my belly and they’re not nice to look at anymore. My belly, when I’m sat in my usual position (as I am now, back against the cushions, legs spread), goes out further than my knees. My skin is sore and in some of my deeper folds, despite the fact that my aunt cleans them daily, a sweaty, yellow pus accumulates. The skin on my outer thighs and lower back that takes most of the pressure of my weight when I’m sat, that’s dark, hard, thick, dead skin and it’s fucking gross. When it cracks it oozes fluid and the gap is really sore, and it cracks most of the time I shift from one bed to the other. The rest of my skin is spotty, stretch marked and in some places, like on my lower back where I can’t reach, I have pretty nasty sores. I find it hard to breathe most of the time, I feel hot all day while at the same time my feet always feel cold because the circulation in my legs is bad. My hair hasn’t been cut in over a year so it’s just a total mess and I only wash it when my aunt has time to bring a second wash bowl for me. The current situation is this. My parents don’t want me to go back to how I was in my flat, just a recluse with no contact except someone who was making me fatter, so I get to stay here. They pay my aunt to look after me. My aunt, considering me an adult capable of making my own decisions in life, lets me eat whatever and however much I want, and brings it to me as I ask for it. A normal day will be something like her waking me at 8 or 9 with a tray of cereal, 8 pieces of buttered toast and a glass of whole milk. She then asks me if I want anything else, which my answer is usually a fried breakfast of some kind. The usual is some eggybread with sausages but depending on my mood, could be a full fried breakfast. After that I usually get some pancakes, waffles or crumpets. Whatever I’m in the mood for. She then changes my pad, gives me a washbowl so I can do my teeth and face and if I want she goes over whatever she can reach with a flannel. For the rest of the morning she cleans and cooks around the house most days and sometimes goes out. In that time I have access to whatever I want as long as I ask for it before she goes out. I usually get a tray of cream and jam doughnuts, a cake of some sort (usually one meant for sharing with 6 or more people), crisps, chocolate, coke, biscuits, pastries, that sort of thing. The main thing she gives me to fill up on is rice pudding. She gets cheap stuff from the cash and carry, so she’s happy to just let me sit and eat a whole case of them. Usually I’ll have 2 or 3 cans along with my other snacks because I find it almost impossible to stop eating until I’m really full. For lunch, if she’s been out, she’ll phone me and ask what I want brought back. Usually I’ll ask for McDonald’s or KFC, sometimes I’ll have something else but it’s usually one of the 2. I’ll have either 2 big mac meals with shakes and 4 double cheeseburgers, or I’ll have 12 pieces, a couple of wraps, lots of fries and coke with a krushem. If she’s home, she’ll cook me whatever I ask for. Most of the time it’ll be something quick and easy, like a pair of oven pizzas and a bag of oven chips, but she often makes me 4 beef burgers if she has the time. I usually get something else as a kind of second lunch like a quiche, sausage roll or pasty or something, then I get dessert. I usually go with cake and ice cream but she sometimes gives me readymade trifles or a pack of cream cakes. I snack again in the afternoon and have my pad changed again if she has time. Dinner is around 5. I eat whatever she’s cooked and usually there’s enough to fill me up, and by now you know how much that can be. There’s almost always dessert and again, I get loads. She makes an incredible apple crumble with custard, she usually makes 2 dishes because I can eat more than one to myself. I also start drinking around dinner time, sometimes I’ll have a bottle of wine or two if we’re having something nice, if it’s just simple food I often eat beer or have jack daniels with my coke. There is more snacking followed by supper. Usually supper is a takeaway, which can be anything from Chinese, Indian or Pizza to kebabs. I usually order far too much and, being stuffed from eating all day, I end up finishing it after she’s gone to bed. Regardless of what I was drinking earlier, I always have sprits by this time of night because that seems to stop me getting a hangover. I will usually commence a self-pitying binge at this point too and have another 4 cans or so of rice pudding, which makes my stomach ache and I end up having a bad night’s sleep in considerable pain. Given that I don’t actually move much in the day, I tend to have a lot of trouble sleeping anyway, and just doze off gradually through the day between meals. I’m supposed to be loosing weight for a gastric band or gastric bypass, whatever seems the best option when I’ve gotten down to a weight where its even possible. I can’t bring myself away from the food though, so I’m just getting bigger each day. I look at my aunt and wonder why I can’t be more like her. All her life she’s eaten what she wants and she’s only about 30 stone. She doesn’t stop moving all day until she sits at the end of the day and watches TV, so I think that’s got something to do with it. Plus it doesn’t take nearly as much food to fill her up. I watch my cousins come and go from the house. It’s good to see them, but it worries me that they’re not learning from my example. I thought by being here I might scare them into taking care of themselves, but they’ve never been bigger. Tim is 13, obese, and has type 2 diabetes. Kate, who is 18, once lost a lot of weight. She got down to 15 stone a couple of years ago but has put most of it back on and is now about 18 stone again. Her sister Vicky has piled on more weight and proudly boasts, in a sick joking way, that she’s the second biggest in the family (after me, of course). She has high blood pressure and sleep apnoea and regularly gets weighed at her doctors surgery. She tells me without a care in the world that she gains weight every time she goes and last time I saw her she said she was 33 stone. She’s only 21 and she eats like I used to. She’s becoming just like I used to be and it scares me that she might end up as fat and useless as me. I hate the thought that, maybe in her mind, I’ve made it okay to be this big. I hide behind a veil of ‘I’m fine’ even though I can’t get out of bed and she just seems to think it’s acceptable to spend your whole life in bed eating yourself to death. In my opinion, the worst of my cousins is probably Jess who is only about 11, who has been allowed to eat so much crap that she’s wearing size 20 adult clothes. I dread to think what the poor girl weighs but she has trouble at school with bullying already. When they are here they get treated to so much food. I can’t tell my aunt to stop feeding them so much, it would just be too hypocritical. But I do feel like history is repeating itself with them. I see my mum regularly; she comes over to see how I’m doing. We don’t go into the fact that I can’t look after myself, and she still thinks I’m in bed all the time because I feel weak. My only lasting friend, Sarah, texts me a lot, I tell her I’m not well. I don’t want to lose her but I don’t want her to see me like this, it’s a hard balancing act. I know she is going to the gym and swimming these days, but she’s on the way down from a high of 23 stone, which she swears she’ll never weigh again. I know that’s probably not true, since she swore that at 12, 14, 17 and 20 stone before-hand. This weekend, for the Queen’s Jubilee, we had a barbeque where most of the family came around. It was a nice change for me, sort of a special occasion. At Christmas I was able to get into my gran’s old wheelchair and scoot into the dining room, where I spent most of the day on the old sofa. Since then I haven’t left the bedroom and as I’ve probably grown a fair bit, it took me, my aunt and my cousin Kate struggling for half an hour to get me standing. I was dizzy by the time I was upright and they helped me down into the chair. I felt so pathetic, especially when they both had to push me. The worst bit was when we got to the doorway, we had to stop while I scooped up a huge slab of flesh that was hanging over the side of the chair and making me too wide for the door. It was nice to be out of the bedroom again. It makes you feel like a prisoner, that you can’t even get up for a minute to stretch your legs or breathe some fresh air, but coming out this weekend was wonderful. They moved the old sofa into the conservatory so that I could sit down in the sunshine. I would have liked to go outside but we were worried that if I went down the ramp, nobody would be strong enough to push me back up it. I don’t have any clothes that fit so I was wearing a bed sheet tucked around me. It was about midday and I was starving so my aunt got me my breakfast, cereal, a box of pop tarts, 4 croissants, 4 pan au chocolates, 12 pancakes with maple syrup and a fruit salad. It was only a small breakfast because the BBQ was starting. It was a lovely day, I spent all day chatting and eating, I must have had about 10 hot dogs (lost count), I ate 5 cheeseburgers and at one point I had a huge steak and chips. No salad whatsoever, haha! I know I drank 12 bottles of beer too because I collected them all next to me. Didn’t really get drunk though. I’m back in my room now though, don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep eating like this before something bad happens again. I feel like death most days. Anyway, I’ll post another update when I remember. Love, Ali xxx