The Big Weekend starts tomorrow...

Ben's been at school this afternoon, rehearsing with the other prize winners for Prize Day: the order they need to sit in before they file up to shake the hands of whichever dignitary will be presenting the prizes. In the Good Old Days before the anorexia stripped Ben of his confidence and social skills, he and his friends would sit with the other pupils listening to speech after speech, playing what they call "Prize Day Bingo". Every time the speaker said a typical-prize-day phrase on their list, they'd check it off, trying not to giggle. I wonder if the dignitaries guessed...

Hip hooray, the party is a stonking success!

"I think Ben's going to bottle out of J's party," hubby P said to me on Saturday. "I can tell, he's getting all nervous and agitated." "I don't think so at all," I said. "He seems absolutely fine. I am convinced he will go." And I really did feel that he was fine. I wasn't getting any of the Old Anorexia vibes which precede bottling out of social events. Ben seemed to be raring to go.

Oh I can't concentrate so I'll write this instead...

Every time I settle down to do some writing, someone interrupts me. I can't write unless I'm left alone, so I've given it up as a bad job for today. What I need is to hire a picture-postcard cottage overlooking the sea, sit down there - alone - with my laptop and write that book.....!

Good grief, there is so much stuff!

In my rough draft I am up to the period between our first CAMHS session at the end of January 2010 and the day Ben 'downed tools' in March - the day he spat out half a tub of ice cream onto the kitchen floor and refused to work with the 3 x meals, 3 x snacks eating plan any longer. And what a lot of notes and other info I've got to plough my way through!

Boiling down the events between Oct 2009 and Jan 2010

The four months between October 2009 and late January 2010 are the most complicated months to describe in the book I'm writing about our journey in and out of anorexia. It's also difficult going back to this period - the period between when the penny finally dropped that Ben was developing anorexia through to the day he ended up in the cardio ward with a pulse rate of 29 which fast-tracked us into treatment the very next week.

Yay, good news all round!

GOOD NEWS! Incredibly, he was smiling when I picked him up from the exam marathon at lunchtime. "The exams were OK", he said. "I didn't manage to finish the conclusion to the last Politics essay and my hand is knackered from writing solid for three hours, but apart from that - fine." So, at his suggestion, we went to the MacArthur Glen shopping outlet / mall in York.

Efferty efferty eff - insomnia as predicted...

This morning sees the final two A Level exams. Worse, because of a timetable / exam boards clash, they're back-to-back, which means three solid hours of writing about Religious Studies and then Politics. As predicted, Ben's insomnia kicked in - KERPOW! - overnight. Result? He was a total zombie this morning...

Ooooh, I am so excited!

FEAST, the 'parent' website of the Around the Dinner Table Forum (for parents and carers of young people with eating disorders) is organising a 2-day carers' conference here in the UK in November for its registered members - and I am so excited about it!

Final week of A level exams...

We will both be glad when this week is over. Ben has three exams this week, all morning exams, which isn't brilliant now the insomnia has returned. Worse still, two of the exams are back-to-back, one after the other. So if he doesn't sleep the night before, it'll be a nightmare.

Why I STILL write my blog...

I've already explained why I started my blog, what Ben thinks of it and its two main purposes i.e. to help other parents of boys with eating disorders realise they're not alone on this journey, and to help raise awareness of the fact that boys get eating disorders as well as girls. Here's why I continue to write my blog, despite my son having been discharged from anorexia treatment in March and well on the road to recovery...

Raising awareness of eating disorders through this blog

This post is in response to a comment about whether, through this blog, I might be wrongly publicising and exploiting eating disorders at the expense of my son's privacy and his need to free himself from his connections with anorexia as he recovers. Here's my response...

A reminder of why I write this blog...

Why do I write this blog? Why do I talk about ultra-personal things here on the Internet, in the public domain, where anyone can see it? Especially when a third party is involved i.e. my own teenage son? What does he think about it? Does he read my blog? Am I maybe a little too obsessed with eating disorders, maybe even glorifying them to a certain extent, rather than putting it all away in a box, forgetting about it and moving onto the next stage in our lives? Here's just one reason why I write this blog, based on a post from August 2011...

He is actually quite touched by the award...

So I subtly asked him what he felt about the two Prize Day awards and he said nothing about thinking it's peculiar or anything like that. And when I prompted him on how he felt about that particular award, he said he felt very touched by it and felt grateful to the school for recognising his fight to overcome the anorexia. Good. That put my mind at rest, so it's only me that's unsure how I feel about it. But what he did say was this...

This is a bit peculiar... or is it? I can't decide...

As you may have seen from my Facebook page, Ben is being given a couple of awards at the school Prize Day (to be held at the end of the month). One is the 'Extended Project Qualification Prize'. Okay, that's brilliant. But the other is the 'D---- H----- Prize for Overcoming Physical Difficulties'. Now, I can't quite decide whether that's really great or whether it's just kind of weird...

Really good session yesterday with the new dietitian

Yesterday Ben and I spent an hour with the new dietitian, putting her in the picture about Ben's anorexia and the stage he is at now - plus all the remaining challenges, as outlined in my previous blog post. It was really good and she 'got it' immediately. But, then, I expected she would. After all, she seems to be one of the region's leading eating disorder dietitians and has also been on the telly several times (talking about eating disorders and working with people with anorexia, etc). So a huge thank you to my dear late Dad for paying for these sessions.

A course of private treatment sessions, starting tomorrow

Both Ben and I are well aware that there are several 'loose ends', shall we say, that need tidying up - and that he has reached a plateau where he needs a little help to move forwards. So tomorrow we start a series of private treatment sessions to try to sort this all out and get things moving again, towards full and complete recovery.