Sophomore Battles with Anorexia

Her heart rate is dropping.

The monitor hooked up to her chest beeps and beeps and beeps. The nurses rush in  time and time again as the beeping speeds up. Her heart was coming closer to stopping.

Her mother nudges her as she tries to sleep.

“You need to stay awake,” she says.

Sophomore Mary Kate Kovzan keeps replaying her mother’s words in her mind as the exhaustion takes a toll.

Her doctor tells her that she will have to stay there for a week until she can be transferred into an eating disorder center. She fights back, wondering how she was supposed to stay awake for seven more nights. The doctor said she was not safe at home. Her heart rate was so low because of the malnutrition. She would have to stay on the monitor for the next seven days.

“Just seeing my mom really upset about it didn’t hit me,” Mary Kate said, “I had become to used to the drama with my eating disorder, and when I was in treatment after that I finally realized, ‘Wow, that was really scary.”

* * *

Mary Kate was just like every other 13-year-old girl. She was a member of the Kansas City Strikers soccer team and weighed about 110 pounds. Her weight was average compared to the other girls on the team.

However, it was her friends as well as the other girls at school who made her believe she needed to be smaller. She was surrounded by her petite friends and had to deal with them talking about how unhappy they were with their own bodies.

She soon decided something needed to be done. She had had enough of seeing her friends put on size 00 dresses while she would put on size 1. As New Year’s rolled around, Mary Kate set a goal to get in shape and lose weight: she would run three to four miles every day and try to cut out all junk foods. It seemed innocent enough.
However, it soon became more and more obsessive. At sleepovers, while the other girls were in the kitchen eating oven-bake pizza, she was back in another room doing sit-ups. People around her didn’t think much of it for a while.

The once-innocent runs became longer. Six to seven mile runs would be followed by multiple sets of sit-ups secretly in her room — as many as it took until she cried. Mary Kate would look up different ways to tone every part of her core. Scabs ran up and down her spine from rubbing on the hardwood floor and left awkward-looking scars.

“It would give me the ultimate buzz,” Mary Kate said. “Kids smoke and drink, but I would do sit-ups to feel that rush of adrenaline and happiness.”

Around three months into her dieting, her mother was becoming skeptical and more conscious about her weight loss.
“It was winter, so she was somewhat hiding her weight-loss through baggy clothing,” mother Kari Kovzan said.

Shortly after, Mary Kate would be diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and exercise addiction. Mary Kate started to think about every possible calorie she would take in. She would not swallow her own spit, and the fear of retaining water was scarier than the feeling of dehydration.

Mary Kate was doing constant body checks, whether it was critiquing herself in a mirror or wrapping her arms around her stomach to see how far they could go. She despised the way she looked. Her thighs were too big. Her stomach was too pudgy. Her cheeks stuck out too much when she smiled.

Calories were the enemy to Mary Kate. The thought that every calorie she ate was another to burn off haunted her. Mary Kate would take the longest route possible to her classes in middle school. She shook her foot under her desk to burn even more calories.

At the deepest moment of her experience with the disorder, almost every food was cut out. She started with fats and then cut out carbohydrates. Soon, she was eating one meal per day. Missing breakfast was easy for her. She would take bowls of Honey Bunches of Oats cereal back to her room that her mother made before school and subsequently would flush the bowl down the toilet. Lunch was also easy to get a way with — at school there was no one to get on her case about eating.

Dinner was another story.

She would drop food on the floor and hide it in her napkin. The anxiety of eating was almost unbearable for Mary Kate. She would throw fits every night at their wooden dinner table. Her parents had no idea what to do. Kari had struggled with an eating disorder but it had been years since she had dealt with those issues. As the fits went on, Mary Kate’s doctors worried about her mental health.

Her doctors put her on antidepressant and anti-anxiety medication because Mary Kate began isolating herself from friends and only wanted to stay at home to work out. In order for the depression medications to kick in, they needed to be absorbed in food. Her doctors told Mary Kate that since she wasn’t eating, the medication was ineffective. She argued with her parents when it was time to eat. She tried to keep calm; she would have to take the anti-anxiety medication 30 minutes prior to meal time in hopes that it would lessen her anxiety around food.

It helped her not have a panic attack during meals, but she still would not eat in peace.The anxiety of eating the food wasn’t as hard as dealing with the guilt shortly after finishing.

“I would have an apple or sandwich and then flip out and try to throw up as much as I could,” Mary Kate said.

But Mary Kate did not like purging. After a few times, she decided she would rather just not eat at all than have to throw the food up.

Mary Kate’s parents followed doctors’ orders and pulled her out of all physical activity, including her favorite sport, soccer. According to her parents, she was at a critically dangerous weight. When her team was going to play in a tournament in Topeka, she begged her parents to let her participate. She finally convinced her parents to let her. At the game, she was struggling with her energy while running up and down the field. She’d miss the ball, she’d miss a tackle. She’d fall, and have trouble getting up. Mary Kate didn’t feel normal, but she didn’t want anyone to know.

When the students at Mission Valley Middle School started to hear about her, they could not seem to grasp the fact that it was a mental disorder. They did not understand that once she started to struggle, it was out of her hands. Hurtful comments that were made about how skinny she was, gave Mary Kate motivation to prove to them that she is stronger now than in the past.

“The hardest part about all of this was probably the people and their reactions to everything, because it’s hard for one person to know everything about eating disorders if you haven’t experienced it,” Kovzan said.

Once Mary Kate hit 72 pounds, her mother knew needed to be somewhere safe. She talked to Kovzan’s doctors and they agreed she needed to go into treatment as soon as possible. According to her father Steve Kovzan, she had a deadly heart rate in the low 30s per minute. Mary Kate was so fragile that she could have passed away in her sleep.

Mary Kate was only 13-years-old at the time and many centers would not take teens under 14. They wanted Mary Kate to go to an all female and teen-only center. After calling all around the United States, they decided on Laureate Eating Disorder Program in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Laureate is one of the top eating disorder treatments in the United States with leading experts, and since Steve’s mother also lives in Tulsa, it was easy for them to go up there every weekend.

According to Mary Kate, this in-patient treatment center was all about accepting the way you look, realizing what harm was being done to your body and finding your inner peace. While they stayed there, have five or six classes every day ranging from working with their body images to gaining knowledge about them.

Mary Kate learned a lot of coping skills like how to lead a normal life without her eating disorder taking over. It also showed the entire family how to recognize the signs of eating disorders and the ways to help her stay on top.

For Mary Kate, God was her helper through the three months living there. She would read little excerpts from the Bible in treatment and relate it to a time in her life. God was then, and still is now, her number one reason why she wants to get better.

“When I was deep into my illness, my mom would always tell me ‘you have to take care of the body that god has given you, it isn’t yours, it’s his,’” Mary Kate said. “God is giving himself to us, so the least I could do is feed [my body] and take care of it.”

She met many girls in a similar situation as hers at Laureate. Although they live in different states, they still keep in touch by e-mail and use each other as motivation. Mary Kate still keeps in touch with the girls who are doing well, however, she chooses not to talk to the ones struggling the most with it as much. She even deleted some girls as friends on Facebook because she did not want to look at them and send herself down a spiral.

She started learning ways to help with her disease. She began referring to her illness as Ed. When she talks about Ed, it is as if Ed is a living person. Mary Kate explained how she and Ed would not see eye to eye and she was losing herself to her so-called friend.

The doctors at Laureate sent her home with an eating plan and routines to stay healthy. Three months after coming home from Laureate, Mary Kate relapsed in November 2008. Since she was living there, she had to enroll in a local school in Tulsa to make sure she was passing. Through the family therapy session at Laureate, the Kovzans learned that relapsing does not have one cause. But for Mary Kate, relapsing meant to go back to the old mindset and routines, like secretly doing sit-ups in her bedroom and cutting out all fats and carbs.

Instead of taking her back to Tulsa, her parents sent her to a program at Research Hospital for Eating Disorders in Kansas City, Missouri. She have meals and spend the day there but come home every night to sleep. She was checked into there for about a month but, according to Kovzan, after she got out she still wasn’t doing everything correctly.

She tried to recover from the relapse, but the habits that she was trying to break, such as skipping meals, were still taking place secretly.

These imperfections that she thought about herself, took a toll in March 2009 when she relapsed fully and returned to Laureate. She stayed there until June 2009.

Mary Kate was thinking positively and her poor thoughts were not overwhelming her following her second stay at Laureate. She stayed this way until December 2009, when she fell deeply into a spiraling depression. The stress of her eating disorder and friends was becoming too much.

One night, she grabbed the Tylenol bottle out of her pantry and swallowed what she and her mother estimate was 45-50 pills.

She was hoping not to wake up.

The next morning, her parents saw the bottle and they rushed her the hospital. She was devastated when she woke up. Mary Kate had to stay in the hospital for three days, and the doctors had her on an IV to reverse the effects of the Tylenol dosage.

They were not going to let her go home, so her parents checked her into a mental hospital for kids with depression. The dull pasty-brown colored walls and inconsiderate faculty made Mary Kate want to go home the second she walked in. She still remembers one of the workers that was 40-years-old and had anorexia. She was one of the skinniest people Mary Kate had ever seen.
“That was really triggering my eating disorder because I was already struggling and being around her made me wish I looked like her,” Mary Kate said.

At this point, Mary Kate could tell her friends and family were becoming mentally tired and felt as if they were getting fed up with it.

“Nobody really understood it,” Mary Kate said. “They thought it was in my control and my friends would act upset with me when I was not doing well.”

Mary Kate started to hang out with different friends shortly after. These girls were people that she somewhat knew but never had hung out with. They helped Mary Kate keep her mind away from her eating disorder and she was able to pull herself out of the downward spiral she was stepping into.

“By them including me and asking me to hang out, they were helping me,” Mary Kate said. “Little things like that were a major part of my recovery and they didn’t even know they were helping.”

She felt as if some people were only concerned about her eating disorder when they saw her and could not see past it. The girls she started to hang out with did not know much about her eating disorder. It was a bit of a relief to not have to always think or worry about her eating disorder.

Mary Kate gets upset when she thinks about what has gone on in the past. More than anything, she feels somewhat embarrassed about her eating disorder.

“There is a lot that an eating disorder comes with,” Mary Kate said, “such as major weight-loss and eating habits that people think aren’t very attractive.”

Some days Mary Kate will look in her bathroom mirror and comment on how certain features looks. But after all of the treatment she has been in, Mary Kate has grown to accept herself.

Mary Kate has been out of treatment for over a year.The never-ending cycle that she thought she would always be in has been a growing experience.

She has items up all around her room to remind her of her journey. Sitting on her dresser are purple and pink studded homemade block letters that spell out recovery. A stack of green and yellow sticky notes lay in front of the letters so Mary Kate can write encouraging statements to post on her mirror.

“I was asked in my English class, ‘Can negative experiences change you for the better?” Mary Kate said. “I think that this negative experience has changed me for the better because it made me stronger and has given me more of an outlook on life”

She goes to an out-patient doctor once a month rather than the twice a week she used to have to go to before and after treatment. The trust between her and her parents has been restored. She roams free when it comes to meals. According to Mary Kate, she knows what she needs to eat daily and if she misses a serving with one meal, she makes it up with the next.

Steve says that since the day they found out Mary Kate had a problem, the entire Kovzan family has been very honest and open with where Mary Kate is and her progress. In return, they received lots of support and compassion from friends and neighbors.

“Our view is that if we can save one girl from the path that Mary Kate went down, then we are making a difference,” Steve said.

Both Mary Kate and her parents agree that the more people are aware and educated about eating disorders the better. Mary Kate is hoping that people gain knowledge and realize that hardcore dieting and anything along that matter is nothing to joke about or consider at an early age.

“My experiences should show,” Mary Kate said, “that thinking it is okay to cut out foods or go on diets can go from being innocent to affecting you for the rest of your life.”