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Teddy
“HELLO, THEODORE, ISN’T it?”
Groggy, I blink at the woman who’s suddenly next to my bed. I hadn’t noticed her enter my room. Well. I was asleep. The clock says it’s half eight in the morning.
“Teddy,” I say. “Everyone calls me Teddy.”
“Hi, Teddy.” She smiles. She’s got tanned skin and blond hair pulled back into a tight bun—the same style Taryn usually has—and a wide smile that appears to have too many teeth. “My name is Alexandra. Sorry it’s such an early meeting here—I’m just fitting this in before my appointments start today, really. I’m one of the dieticians here.”
I jolt and sit up straighter. A dietician? My mouth dries. I’m fine. And I can’t talk to anyone here. It was hard enough talking to Joe at Roseheart—in all the sessions he insisted I had after I’d gone to him worried about the unhealthy food in the canteen—because in each session, the voice in my head was screaming at me that I definitely didn’t have a problem like he seemed to think, that I was just making wise choices and that not wanting to put junk in my body was a good thing. The voice was begging not to tell Joe anything, saying I was just taking up his valuable time and resources, taking it away from people who really needed the help. Like Ivelisse.
And these past few days, I thought because I’d avoided the doctors here finding out about my fear of unhealthy food that it meant I wasn’t really unwell, not like Joe had begun to persuade me that I was, telling me all about OSFED and orthorexia, two eating disorders I’d not previously heard of, and pushing me to see a doctor. After all, no one here had asked me about my eating—even though eating disorders can explain heart symptoms... Last year, Ivelisse had a relapse and was absent for two months—she caught up later, during the summer, and Robert came back for a couple of weeks to dance with her so they could perfect their pas de deux. The rest of the time she was dancing with one of the second-year male dancers who was also taking time to catch up having missed a lot due to pneumonia. But when Ivelisse had the relapse, Taryn told me how she’d found pro-ana blogs in her search history. I didn’t really know what they were, but I looked them up and was opened to a world of ‘bloggers’ who promoted what they called the ‘anorexia lifestyle’ and promised to ‘help’ people, guiding them in how to successfully make them people they are proud of. Countless of these bloggers wrote about goal posts. Things to strive toward: If you end up with orthostatic intolerance or arrhythmias, you’re doing it right! You’re showing you’re in control! It’s proof of how disciplined you are!
Of course, I’d never tried to achieve those things. That wasn’t my goal—I am solely concerned with the quality of food, with making sure everything is organic and healthy, but those pro-ana sites taught me that EDs can cause heart problems. Joe’s reiterated as much since, when he’s tried to make me see that I could have orthorexia—an obsession with healthy eating that has gone too far. He says some doctors classify it as OSFED—Other Specified Feeding and Eating Disorder—rather than a separate disorder in and of itself, but I thought the idea of me having either OSFD or orthorexia was silly. I couldn’t possibly have an eating disorder. Yet I had begun to wonder if maybe it wasn’t healthy to spend so much time thinking and worrying about what I ate, especially when most of the other diploma undergrads didn’t seem to spend anywhere near as much time planning their meals and fretting.
In the last year, Joe’s done a lot of work with me on food education, after I initially went to him with my concerns over the canteen food. I’d told him the cooks needed to switch to more organic food and to offer more meals without carbs. Joe assured me I was eating healthily, but he was wrong. I couldn’t eat healthily with what the academy was serving.
“It’s not right,” I’d said. “We need more free-range chicken available, and I wanted to have salad instead of potatoes, but the cook wouldn’t let me. She’s giving out all this wrong advice, and I need these healthy foods, not all this poison. Can’t you just talk to her?”
Joe had frowned and asked me for more details about my diet.
“Well of course I don’t eat dessert,” I said, when he’d prompted me share the desserts I ate. “Unless it’s fruit salad.”
“Because of the calories?” He squinted at me. “Are you counting calories, Teddy?”
“No!” I don’t know why but that had annoyed me. “Desserts aren’t healthy. Especially the amount of butter the cook puts in her cake.”
“How do you know how much butter is in the cake?”
I shrugged. “Because I asked her for the recipe, pretended I was interested in sharing it with my mum. But I wanted an apple, that was all, and she wouldn’t let me. And I needed to have an apple because apples are healthy. They’re good foods.”
“But you need to have carbs—and you’ve told me you’ve practically cut out the whole carb group.”
“I have sweet potato.”
“You have one portion of that a week, Teddy, according to this.” He nodded at the list he’d made as I’d proudly reeled off a typical menu—the proof that I was being healthy. Joe shook his head. “No rice, no white potato, no pasta.”
“Because I need to be healthy.”
“You’re not getting enough energy though.”
“I am. I eat loads of salad. All sorts of fruit and veg. And chicken. And I don’t eat ridiculously small portion sizes of those, like Ivelisse does. It’s not about calorie-counting.”
“But you need foods from all the food groups. Include carbs and dairy. They won’t hurt you.”
It didn’t matter how many times Joe told me I needed to eat these ‘unhealthy’ foods, how he said my body needed energy, because I just couldn’t do it. And I couldn’t see how eating healthily could really be a problem.
But since I saw the page in the HCM booklet about diet and hydration, it’s made me wonder. I’ve always prided myself on maintaining an optimal level of health. Only, if my heart thickening isn’t down to HCM, then it has to be something I’ve done wrong.
I haven’t been eating healthily enough. If the genetic test and the catheterization prove it’s not HCM, then it’s down to me.
“So, your doctors just wanted me to have a little chat with you,” Alexandra says, sitting in the chair next to my bed. “Just because they’ve noticed you’re not really eating much.”
“I’m not hungry.” I grip the edge of the scratchy blanket too hard and stare at the tray at the foot of my bed. My breakfast is on it, uneaten. “And my nose and front teeth still hurt. And I don’t really like hospital food, either.” Well, my teeth actually feel a bit better now, but I always find it harder to eat when I’m stressed—and this is definitely a stressful time.
I want to scream. It’s a tug of war inside me. One team wants to tell them my worries about food, and even what Joe suspects, because I want the reassurance that my food issues haven’t actually caused this heart condition or made it worse, yet I also don’t want to be told it is HCM because that means no dancing. At least if it is OSFED or orthorexia or whatever causing this, then I can get better, right? I can dance again.
Alexandra gives a small laugh. “That’s understandable. And of course being in a strange environment with strange food can make you less hungry too. But we just wanted to check in with you to see if you’d benefit from any supplements.”
My stomach drops. Supplements. Joe has mentioned those more than once, trying to persuade me to have them. A few months ago, he brought in some starter packs. Fortisip Compact. Vanilla flavor and strawberry. I couldn’t bring myself to try them—there was too much glucose and milk in them—and I told Joe I’d try harder to stick to the meal plan he’d given me. Joe had agreed to it, saying that for the time being that was okay, but if I began to lose more weight or my health declined, he’d have to notify health professionals—and my family. I’d vowed it wouldn’t come to that, coming up with ways to make myself heavier at weigh-ins by water-loading. After all, Roseheart isn’t an ED Recovery Centre where they’re more clued up on how sneaky people like me can be. To some extent, I’m taken at face-value, and because I’ve resisted any official diagnosis, unlike Ivelisse, I’m not taken out of Roseheart for separate appointments.
And that’s surely proof I’m not sick anyway, else Joe would just make the appointments for me and tell my dad, regardless of what I wanted. Makes me think that orthorexia can’t be as serious an eating disorder as anorexia, when I’m given choices about whether to get help and Ivelisse wasn’t—even though we’ve always been told never to compare EDs.
Or maybe yours just isn’t bad enough yet.
I swallow hard. As Alexandra asks me which foods I like and don’t like, I wonder if Joe will tell others. He has to have heard of my diagnosis by now. Maybe he’s said something, hinted at things. Maybe that’s why this dietician’s really here. Maybe she’s trying to confirm what Joe’s said. Maybe they’re just looking for yet another reason why I can never dance again.
“Okay, well, your BMI is a little low, but it’s not too worrying,” the dietician says.
A little low.
Not too worrying.
The words suddenly seem like both a relief and an insult. They don’t think there’s anything wrong with me, so they’re not going to make me eat. But for some reason it seems like an insult—like I’m not doing this right, like I’m not healthy enough. Yet it also doesn’t make any sense because I don’t want to lose weight, not like Ivelisse said she did, when, last year, she broke down crying over eating a forkful salad.
See, that’s the difference. She doesn’t want to eat anything. But I do. I just want to eat healthy things.
“Right, well I’ll be off then,” Alexandra says. “I’ll let the kitchen know which foods you like. See if we can get something softer as well after the nasal surgery. I’m sorry you were given fish and chips before. That’s not good practice. Should’ve been soups after a surgery like that.”
I smile and nod, even though the idea of soup has me recoiling. But I listed fruits and vegetables mainly for Alexandra’s list, though I did then add yoghurt and lasagna as a panicked afterthought because I don’t want anyone here thinking I’ve got a problem with food. I need to get away from this hospital as soon as I can.
I just hope I don’t get faced with lasagna tonight.
“What... What about ballet?” My voice squeaks, just as Alexandra’s almost out of the door. “Will I be able to dance?”
I don’t know why I’m asking her when she’s a dietician and when I already know the answer, been told it countless times. But maybe I am hoping for a different answer. Maybe she doesn’t know much about my suspected heart condition and will give me the go-ahead. And, after all, there’s no reason for her to suspect I’ve got an eating disorder, so she can’t limit my exercise on that basis, not like how the doctors last year said Ivelisse would’ve had to have stopped ballet for a much longer time than two months if she’d continued to lose more weight.
“That’ll be a question for your cardiologist,” Alexandra says. “I’m sorry I don’t know.”
But I do.
And I need someone to tell me I can do ballet still. I need that permission to be a danseur, to be me. Everything else is inconsequential.