My last day of school for awhile was the stuff of which melodramas are made. I fainted during French class and our teacher frantically sent me to the school nurse. My mom was then called at work to come and get me. Miss Connaught told me that I desperately needed help after I sheepishly apologized for causing a commotion during her class.

Since both my parents worked during the day, I was sent over to Grandma and Grandpa's from that day on, ostensibly so someone could keep a watchful eye on me. It had been decided that I would be admitted to St. Joseph's Hospital, as my problem had escalated to the point where my life was in danger.

Secretly, I was relieved. I hated feeling so lousy all the time, not being able to attend classes and lying at 619 Talbot Street in a semi-vegetative state for hours. I had developed a keen interest in cooking after returning from the states and spent hours concocting meals for the rest of the family.

I was to learn that this was one of the symptoms of anorexia, but at the time I thought it was the answer to my nagging hunger. I could enjoy all of the aspects of eating without actually putting a morsel into my own mouth.

Every morning, I cooked scrambled eggs for Grandpa, drawing in the aroma like a dehydrated sailor sucking up fresh water. It gave me an exhilarating sensation of well-being. As I sat watching my grandfather enthusiastically eating my finished product, my soul was extremely gratified.

The days began to dissolve monotonously into one another. During the day, I allowed myself the coveted reward of consuming a whole digestive biscuit, taking over an hour to let every morsel dissolve on my tongue. Then, to get rid of the calories lurking in my body, I'd drag myself outside and walked with slow-motion heaviness down Central Avenue to Richmond Street and back. It took over forty minutes to do the two-block distance and I nearly collapsed every time.

Poor Grandma and Grandpa, having to watch this horror show for eight hours a day and wondering how much longer I'd live. I was so inwardly focused that I never thought of their sorrow and worry, only that I had to adhere to my daily routine. It was the epitome of all-encompassing self-absorption. I was sick, selfish and oblivious to my family's agony.

Finally, a bed opened up at St. Joe's and I was admitted under the care of Dr. Gerald Tevaarwerk. He was a jolly, easy-going European physician to whom I instantly took a liking. He asked me some fundamental questions, then spent a lot of time discussing my dietary habits.

Finally, after examining me and writing for a few minutes in his chart, he looked level-eyed at me and said, "You know that you are suffering from anorexia nervosa."

At this point, I was neither shocked nor indignant, only relieved that matters were now out of my inept hands and securely ensconced in those of a thoughtful professional. "Yeah, I guess so. This wasn't supposed to happen."

Dr. Tevaarwerk smiled comfortingly and put a large, warm hand on my withered one. "We're going to help you here. Don't worry. You're going to be alright." For the first time since this whole nightmare began, I thought that perhaps there was some hope for me after all.

* * * * * * * * *
I was put on a behaviour modification program to regain some of the lost weight, a method with which I was to become very familiar over the years and grow to despise. Back in 1971, anorexia nervosa was not the well-known and highly-publicized phenomenon that it is today. Little was documented about the disorder and treatments were basically experimental and awkward. I was the sole sufferer in our school's four hundred populace and it was very unusual that I was well-acquainted with another anorexic, poor Fiona.

It was ironic that I emulated Susan Dey and put her on the pedestal of the artistically and visually exalted, because it was later brought forth that she, too, had been anorexic at the same time that I was. Yes, the modern Western World was going to hell in a handcart, accompanied by the sweet strains of David Cassidy's youthful voice.

I grew quickly tired of the behaviour modification routine. I was supposed to eat something at each meal in order to receive any privileges. My first privilege was to be able to get out of bed for an hour a day, even though it was an effort just to roll over. Fear once again reared its repulsive head and symbolically wired my jaws shut.

I couldn't eat that disgusting Special K they gave me, which would undoubtedly put great rolls of ugly, yellowish flab on my body and crush the beautiful thinness out of it. Eating was wrong; it felt insidiously evil, it was a sign of weakness and I hated it. Surely something could be worked out with Dr. Tevaarwerk to get me out of that prison-like hospital without relinquishing my hard-earned skinny body. I had gone through so much unspeakable agony and torment to achieve it. This just wasn't fair!

For a week, I lay in that semi-private room, staring vacantly at the television and feeling too weak and tired to move a muscle. My consciousness rolled in on itself, old songs by the Everly Brothers wafted into my ears and ignited enticing memories of happier, healthier days. I was dying.

I'm not sure what zapped me back into the realm of the living and gave me that initial push to fumble out of the suffocating chasm and breathe with renewed vigour. It was probably my family's prayers and their frequent visits to my bedside, forcing me to see that death was not acceptable at the age of sixteen. Or perhaps it was my intrinsically stubborn nature that awoke from the spell of psychological suicide and decided that it still had things to accomplish before my time came.

Whatever the catalyst, I lost no more weight after that. I even took a few mouthfuls of food the next day, something I hadn't done in many weeks.

My recovery progressed fairly rapidly after that and within six weeks I was able to go home for a few hours. The road was not bereft of a vast number of potholes, however. There were only certain foods that I would allow myself, like unbuttered spinach, raw carrots and celery, uncreamed cottage cheese and digestive cookies. Everything else was forbidden.

A dietician was sent up to work with me and for a long time I was unresponsive to her suggestions to try different foods. "You people are just trying to make me fat!" I snapped, dismissing her with a cold stare and defiantly folded arms.

Dr. Tevaarwerk wanted me to be weighed twice a week and with each minimal gain came a step closer to freedom. I fought him all the way, protesting vehemently when I gained a few ounces and secretly rejoicing when I lost, even if it meant giving up some privileges. I was confused, angry and desperate, feeling stabs of guilt whenever I ate and waves of comforting virtue when I refused. For awhile, it seemed as if I'd never make any lasting progress, for any gained weight was immediately lost again.

But eventually, I tired of the hospital routine and longed to go back to school. I was very much afraid of failing grade eleven and having to repeat the year. This began to take precedence over my desire to be ultra-skinny.

My first overnight pass was a truly bizarre experience. When I entered my bedroom for the first time in two months, it was as though I hadn't been there for years. From the time I'd returned from Rhode Island I'd been only partially aware of my surroundings and thus, everything had a feeling of unreality about it.

Now, much better and well-nourished for the first time in six months, it was as if I'd awakened from a coma. I sat on my bed, revelling in the familiarity and realizing how homesick I'd been. Everything was going to be alright, just as Dr. Tevaarwerk had assured me. I would soon be coming home to a normal life.

I told my doctor that I did not want to weigh more than ninety pounds, so he calculated that I would be able to eat fourteen hundred calories per day to maintain that.

I returned to school in November, on a day that was dusted by the first snowfall of the season. Dad would drive me there and back to the hospital in the evening and I was extraordinarily nervous about jumping back into the fray after such a lengthy and mysterious absence. I weighed eighty pounds and still looked very gaunt and frail I had hollow cheeks, thin hair and bones protruding from my stylish clothes, which Dad had helped me pick out.

I felt alienated and set apart from my classmates. The atmosphere at school was so vibrant and colourful compared to the muffled colourlessness of St. Joseph's Hospital. Moving between the two realms proved to require more sophisticated adaptive skills than I possessed. On top of all that, I'd fallen staggeringly behind in my studies.

I decided to drop both physics and Spanish, as I could make up the credits in grade twelve. I already had an extra one for that year anyway and aside from that, I couldn't grasp the fundamentals of physics at the best of times, let alone after missing two months of it.

Reactions to my health crisis were mixed. Teachers thought I was suffering from some life-threatening illness until they learned otherwise and treated me with awkward over- protectiveness. The students, on the other hand, figured I was strung out on Speed, thus achieving such a scrawny body. I must confess that I didn't find this assumption too distasteful. At least it gave me a certain element of coolness and 1970's chic that had never been associated with me before.

Readjusting was difficult, as I was still very wrapped up in the anorexic experience and obsessing about food and calories. Not only that, but I had been living a lie for months, claiming that I'd lost my appetite and thus had been unable to eat for so long. The truth was that I had been riddled with jolting hunger pangs the entire time, fighting the constant desire to stuff food into my salivating mouth.

There just didn't seem to be another way to explain why I couldn't eat; the whole experience was so bizarre. How could I tell everyone that I was simply too terrified to eat anything for fear of becoming fat? It didn't make sense and would have produced anger and frustration from all concerned. So I lived this brazen lie, secure in the knowledge that anorexia was something about which little was known or written.

I had a difficult time at school at first. I felt as though I was in a thick, isolated bubble, watching the other kids from a distance as they arrived at Saunders each day from their homes. They were living out their academic lives with spontaneity and rampant energy of normal, healthy teenagers and were generally unfettered by life and death concerns.

How could I ever attain that level of carefree abandon again? There was nothing typical about my situation, having my home at the hospital, being monitored as I ate, weighed frequently to keep privileges and looking like a starving Biafran with large tufts of hair missing. How could this have happened to me?

For the first time, I thought about how chillingly similar I was to Fiona. She'd always appeared as a kind of sideshow freak to me, untouchable, mysterious, and frightening. Now I was the embodiment of these elements. In my relentless quest for popularity and chic, glamorous sleekness, I had achieved the antithesis and all my suffering had been counterproductive.

I ate only enough to maintain my weight at eighty pounds, holding fast to the deceitful notion that I had no appetite whatsoever. My math teacher tutored me after school in Trigonometry, but I found it very difficult to grasp.

English, with the personable and charismatic Brian Kellow, involved a great deal of catch-up reading but was manageable. French and geography presented little challenge that I wasn't able to meet. That left physical education, much desired for the exercise involvement. Academically-speaking, anyway, my situation didn't appear dismal and hopeless. Perhaps I wouldn't flunk grade eleven after all.

I hung around primarily with Leslie Stallard, whom I'd gotten to know a bit the year before. She shared my desire for slimness. She wasn't anorexic, but monitored her eating carefully and was quite skinny, priding herself on being able to wear the same clothes she had since grade eight.

Leslie was small-boned, with a round, cherubic face, wire- rimmed glasses and large, serious eyes that reflected a rather sombre nature. She was bright, articulate and we bonded quickly and with a fierce intensity. It felt good to have a friend who wasn't consumed with seething hormones and addled with psychedelia and hard rock.

My life had settled into a sense of relative calm, for awhile anyway. Although I still felt like a freak and had trouble concentration, the raging fears, so prominent in my thoughts for so long, had abated. Then came the fateful Day of the Dad's Oatmeal Cookie.

I had been released from the hospital after maintaining my weight for a month. One afternoon, shortly after returning home in early December, I sat down at the kitchen table to do some studying. As I opened my math text, my eyes fell idly upon a box of cookies on the counter and I found myself unable to pull my gaze from it. I had loved those cookies at one time and would think nothing of eating four of them at a sitting. "Despicable fat slob!" I spat at myself for pausing to lust over junk food. Those days were long gone.

My mind suddenly began calculating calories and energy expenditure. I had walked two miles home from school, so surely I could eat one cookie at one hundred calories a shot and still have a hundred to spare. My hands shook as I extracted the forbidden treat from its cellophane wrapping. My heartbeat thundered heavily in my ears and seemed to strain to escape a taut ribcage. I lifted the hard, brown biscuit to dry, trembling lips.

Then, in a single, rapid motion, I bit off a tiny piece and turned it over and over on my tongue. Sucking on it until it was nothing but a mass of pulpy, sugary sweet pap, I squeezed my eyes shut tightly and swallowed hard. The clock on the kitchen wall hammered the cloistered silence away and I felt as though I had succeeded in committing a diabolical crime.

A hole had been torn in the dam of resistance and great torrents of water came bursting forth. I devoured the rest of the cookie greedily, chewing just enough to be able to swallow it without choking.

Then, all too quickly, the morsels were gone and I sat there amid a little pile of crumbs and wanted more. My appetite, long dormant and lying in wait like a panting tigress, leapt from its hiding place and demanded to be fed. Pushing all negative thoughts aside, I reached for another cookie and ate it, faster and more savagely than the last. I kept this motion going until, ten minutes later, the entire box was gone.

"Oh God, no!!" I gasped in strangulated horror as my stomach stretched with more food than it had seen in many months. "What have I done?!" Panic wove its spidery legs around each nerve of my body and propelled me off the chair. Then I launched into a frenetic frenzy of physical activity, running blindly up and down stairs, flailing my arms to burn more calories and clamping my teeth down on my tongue to keep from screaming.

I had to get rid of that disgusting mass of sugar and fat that sprawled from one end of my stomach to the other, creating blubber with each passing second which would gather with laughing conspiracy on my bones.

I'd never experienced such unbridled anxiety and as the sweat burst out of my pores. My legs felt like soft sticks of gum as I refused to stop moving until I literally collapsed in a twisted pile in the bare hallway.

Then, as quickly as the panic attack had hit me, it abated, leaving me with a curiously warm sensation of grudging acceptance. Sure, I'd eaten far too much just then, but that was only because I'd denied myself for so long. It was the initial reintroduction into the world of eating, a brief, passing phase that would not show itself again.

Now I could eat normally, fourteen hundred calories a day and reach my goal of ninety pounds naturally and comfortably. I would announce to my family that night that my appetite had returned and all would be well. The nightmare was over.

But it had only just begun. Shortly after the feeling of well- being had settled upon my family and me, my love-hate relationship with food and eating took a disturbing turn. I became deluded, somehow, into thinking that I could eat whatever I wanted in unlimited quantities as long as I kept physically active.

I could consume three substantial meals a day, plus countless snacks, treats and calorie-laden concoctions, if I traded off the locust-like eating with rapid walking, numerous sit-ups and push- ups. I even made a valiant stab at jockdom by joining the track team.

This was a beneficial move, for it got me actively involved with other students and provided a focus for my ambitious spurts of energy. Everyday after school, I ran circuits in the halls, totalling over five miles each day, then practised racing, followed by muscle-strengthening exercises. Being light worked to my advantage, so I became one of our coach's favourite athletes.

I even began developing some friendships through the track team, but was so focused on calorie-burning as opposed to teamwork that these relationships didn't ever really go anywhere. It was an extremely egocentric and all-encompassing world I occupied and I was incapable of breaking away from it.

By Christmas, I weighed eighty-five pounds and was taken aback by the sobering reality that I had only a five-pound margin before hitting the red-letter ninety-pound mark. I'd been eating with reckless abandon, so delirious about being able to fill my face to its capacity and escape the ravaging hunger pangs that had become my enemy.

I remember how hunger had crossed the border from overwhelming to simply normal and regular sensations of needing food. It had caused surges of fluttering panic as I was forced, by my greedy masticating, to abandon my "security blanket" of feeling deservedly starved and thus thin and empty enough to be acceptable.

Losing that gauge left me awash in negative emotions of shame, guilt and self-loathing. I began to feel fat again, as I had at one hundred ten pounds, and bemoaned my lost skinny virtuousness. What was happening to me? Why was I relinquishing my perfect body for the love and pursuit of food, the enemy? It would make me ugly again, and no longer the centre of my father's attention.

For whatever else the anorexia had accomplished, it had gotten me noticed at last and had somehow united my parents in a common cause: Saving daughter Jane from herself. Even Jim was less hostile to me and some of his friends even stopped to talk to me in the halls now. This whole experience certainly had not been entirely bad.

One afternoon, feeling positively hungry and gluttonous, I engaged in a feeding frenzy that included such formerly banned delicacies as ice cream, frozen Cool Whip, scooped right out of the container, Pop Tarts, English Muffins with jam and canned rice pudding.

I ate rapidly and thoughtlessly, shutting out all notions of what those calories would do to me, in favour of continuing the lusty affair between my taste buds and the decadent, nutritionally-bereft goodies. By the time my parents returned from work, I must have ingested over ten thousand calories and was in a state of utter chaos.

They found me racing up and down the stairs and watched as I kept up an impossible pace for over an hour. Then I sat on the livingroom floor and engaged in sit-ups until I thought I would vomit. Tears streamed down my face the entire time and my body was racked with broken sobs.

This became an all-too-familiar scene at our house: Bingeing and manic directionless exercise, accompanied by hysteria and crying jags. It must have been difficult to watch and my father, understandably, grew short-tempered and impatient. He could not understand why I was eating so much, given that I only wanted to weigh ninety pounds and it was causing me so much pain to consume food as such an accelerated pace.

I didn't understand it either at the time, but in retrospect I believe that my body was simply fighting to regain all of the weight that I'd lost. It was not natural for me to weigh much under one hundred ten pounds. Craving so much food, and such high-calorie food at that, was old Mother Nature's way of looking out for herself.

I nervously stepped on the scale the next day and shuddered as it registered eighty-six pounds. I was almost at my maximum. That was it, I thought firmly. I just won't eat a thing for three days to compensate for that disgusting binge. This brought a barrage of protests from Dad, who had gotten weary of the whole anorexic set-up and finally lost his temper at my juvenile behaviour.

It infuriated him that I was so wantonly self-destructive and that even though I'd "gotten my appetite back" I was no closer to recovering from my food obsessions than I ever was. It was saddening, exasperating and made him feel helpless and ineffective. He and Mom were forced to sit back and watch me drowning in misery and self-abusive activities. Where would it all end?

Christmas came and went, punctuated with a heated argument between Dad and me about eating. He told me that I was afraid to grow up and act my age, and that I should go with the fourteen- year-olds like Jim as that's how old I looked and behaved. I sulked on the couch, arms folded defensively across my chest and scowled at the in the inescapable fact that he was right. In the New Year, a psychiatrist was summoned to help me. His name was Wendell Haim, a long-haired, bearded hippie who came to the house, sat cross-legged on the floor of the family room. He then told us that the whole family was sick, not just me. He said he wanted to treat the four of us.

I thought Dr.Haim was crazier than I was and was opposed to this kind of communal family therapy stuff. Jim was also adamantly against any "stupid shrink picking away" at his head. For once I agreed with him, for after all, I was the one with the problem and because of it, everyone was suffering.

Dad said something to me around that time that hurt me deeply and caused even more feelings of guilt and self-hatred to well up in my heart. After one of my emotional scenes, where I ran about the house screaming and crying my head off following a binge, he said sharply, "Now look. This nonsense has gone on long enough. There are three other people in this house and I'll be damned if one member is going to ruin everybody's lives! You'll either get help or you'll be asked to leave".

A thick, salty lump had risen in my throat, threatening to choke off my air. I couldn't believe my ears. I was being told that if I didn't get better, I'd be kicked out and banished from my home for destroying everyone. What could I do to stop this insanity?

I agreed to see Dr. Haim, who was the embodiment of the quintessential crazy shrink, making even his nuttiest patients appear sane. Although I believe that his heart was in the right place and that he was basically a good person, L. felt that all my problems stemmed from the fact that I desperately craved love and affection from a dominant male personality. Since he thought my father was a poor provider, he took it upon himself to be a "surrogate one".

With his unruly, curly hair, affable grin and khaki clothes, this man was the eccentric/rebel/misunderstood-but- conscientious/male role model that he imagined that an affection- starved sixteen-year-old woman/child needed and craved.

Thus he went about trying to "win me over" with a heartfelt poem written for and about me entitled "The Chrysalis" that made me feel exalted and special. He conducted our sessions over at his pad that he shared with his live-in girlfriend. Who knows how long this strange little cerebral affair would have continued, but it came to an abrupt end one afternoon. I remember it vividly, as if it happened only last week.