By RAY DUCKLER
Monitor staff
Sunday, August 24, 2014
Katherine Drouin a native to NH and a former student at WRHS speaks about her battle with an eating disorder. She describe the illness as the "Zone", after starving herself for days she relieves herself by gorging on an enormous amount of food. She stands 5 feet tall and weights only 60 pounds, she now 36 years old living in Plymouth NH. She is so thin that when she exposes she shoulder you can see her collarbone, skinny limbs, veins protruding, and weak.
She speaks of her daily routine, very basic, consisting of the brutal cycle of starve, binge, and then purge, and repeat. She states in her routine it takes her about 3 hours to binge and only 2 minutes to purge.
Most people ask, "who in their right minds, would do this to themselves?" Katherine is a smart, articulate person, who was involved in school and got good grades, but what went wrong? When a person starves themselves the brain make it self changes, the eating disorder becomes a mental illness very much addiction. She knows she has addictive DNA in her family, her relatives dying of a drug and alcohol related issues, other members abusing prescriptive drugs.
She is aware people want to help, in NH finding an "inpatient" treatment facility is hard and sticking to the program for her is even harder. She feels alone in the process, even with family at her side.
Drouin describes her self as a perfectionists, on the cross country team she was getting better, getting faster, winning races. This seem to be her down fall. She quickly realized that if she slimmed down, she was faster. She would hide food at the dinner table as a teenager, her father not knowing what to do feels as though enabled his daughters illness.
During her college years she learned how to eat at night and purge, and start shop lifting for food. She admitted to being caught and arrested about a dozen times, one cuff would be enough to make it around two wrist. She did sometime in jail for her theft, she admitted to not wanting to pay for food she was going to throw up. Her criminal record included 70 arrests since 1997.
She has sought out help in treatment clinics such as Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Tulane University, New York Presbyterian, University of NC, and Westbrook , ME. in 2002, she stayed at the NH hospital for a year, shackled to the bed, with a feeding tube inserted into her stomach. Her family fears for her death, yet she still prepares for her nightly rituals of starving, binging, and purging. During her meeting with the write she consumed up to 10,000 calories in a sitting and when she was done consuming it all, she said "its time" she vomits. When she is complete she realizes that she had let someone witness her addiction and she feels ashamed.
This article discusses the struggle this women has with Bulimia and Anorexia, she tries various was to seek treatment, through various facilities, in patient treatment. Next Sunday they bring her to a treatment facility down in Waltham, Mass. Hopefully she will keep her end of the bargain and not break any of the rules or sign herself out.
