I recently received this email from Lane:
"Hello Medusa, I am writing to you with the sad news that an eating disorder has claimed yet another person's life.
Her name was Kylie & she passed on the night of January 2, 2011 of cardiac arrest.
I personally never knew Kylie that well; I met her at Thanksgiving last year when I met my boyfriend's family. I instantly knew she had an eating disorder from talking to her. I'm in recovery myself. She snuck away when it was time to eat. She complained about the cholesterol in the lemon meringue pie. She only ate the smallest amount that she could get away with.
I saw her again on two separate occasions after that; both times I thought about talking to her about it, but I didn't feel I knew her well enough.
She had been sick for eight years, ever since she was 17 & hated her body long before that. She was always round & curvy & hated her shape; at school she envied the popular girls who were all super-skinny. She always wanted to be one of them.
Her mother told me that they'd talk about their larger hips as "the family curse." Her mother thought they were only joking, but Kylie truly did think of it as a curse. She had previously been very close to her family. In the past years she moved into an apartment alone & isolated herself from the world.
I'm told that before her illness took hold of her, she was bubbly despite being shy, that she loved making paper flowers & liked practical jokes.
The causes of her demise were low levels of potassium, sodium & dehydration that caused her already weak heart to fail. Her body had begun to feed on its own muscle, including her heart, to survive. They found blisters on her knuckled from purging.
We reluctantly combed through her personal journal & found out that she had begun inducing vomiting only one month before dying from it.
She wrote that she had never successfully purged before, until early December.
She was 25."
Thank you for sharing, Lane. May Kylie rest in peace.
Link to photo:
http://www.expat-at-large.com/
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4 comments:
so sad :(
How terrible, but also... how awful that something so intimate was shared with the entire extended family including someone's girlfriend? I have trouble believing the details of this submission and the tidy circumstances of death, but that doesn't mean cardiac arrest isn't something we risk with every single purge.
Thank you Medusa, today is the four-week anniversary of her demise. Hard to believe that only four weeks & one day ago she was still alive.
Thats actually very scary. 2 MONTHS? Yeah, this is a wakeup call! Ive been at it for 4 years and need to convince myself that im not really getting away with anything
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