By Terri Mork Speirs
Once, I sat in the waiting room of a health care clinic in St. Paul, Minn., and I longed to be fat. I wished it for both my husband, Bob, and I. To make matters worse, as we sat in that lobby we were surrounded by people who were clinically obese, individuals who filled the entire spaces of their respective four-legged chairs with their own selves. I felt envious. Sitting among them, I pretended to read magazines as I secretly studied their round faces and plump abdomens. Their lives seemed so easy and wonderful, I thought. I wanted to be like them, or more exactly, I wanted Bob to be like them.
At the time Bob was clinically classified as anorectic, one who is pathologically underweight. He had lost about 50 pounds in two months due to a freaky kind of instant liver failure. His sunken yellow eyes and bony white cheeks reminded me of skeletal men behind barbed wire I’d seen in photographs of prison camps. We didn’t take any pictures at the lowest point of his weight loss. It was too awful to document.
Bob’s liver failure caused a contagion of physical turmoil including kidney risk, low blood pressure, dehydration, brain fog, severe itching, depression, and slow but constant physical decline. But for some reason the eating disorder bothered me the most.
Maybe it was because hunger seems controllable. Preventable. Fixable. You can’t change internal tissue, but you can eat more food. Right? I spoon-fed Bob during this time, thinking it would help. It did, but not enough. I learned that the physiology of eating is complicated, although Bob did not have the anorexia and nervosa – when you equate your weight with your self-worth. He only had the anorexia part, a physical inability to digest food. However, I believe our attitude about food morphed into some sort of nervosa because eating became a psychological seesaw between Bob and me. It became our marital baseline.
I would pressure him to eat; therefore, he ate only to please me.
Then he would vomit. Not a quiet little urp but a five-minute violent retching.
Then his pruritus would ignite. It was a fiery itch that caused Bob to scratch head to toe until his skin turned red with welts and blood.
Then I would feel bad for making him eat and back off.
Then he would lose more weight, thus weakening his vitals all the more.
Then I would try another tactic to get Bob to eat.
And then the whole cycle pretty much started again. (It must be noted that many people reached out to help us, including my dear mother-in-law who moved in with us during this time and a neighbor who, miraculously, happened to be a trained dietician specializing in assisting anorectic individuals.)
That’s why I longed for obesity that day in the clinic waiting room. I’m not saying it made sense or that others don’t have their own troubles. I’m just saying that the overweight people looked so peaceful and beautiful, contrasted to Bob who was practically just bones. Flesh equated to living, bones to dying.
Emaciation had never before been so personal to me, and I was shocked to watch how fast malnourishment takes hold. In a matter of weeks, Bob transitioned from one who could gobble a plate of brats with ease, to one who would barely take in a little bowl of red Jell-O without heaving it back up. I hadn’t known that the eating processes are so very fragile and interconnected, although I should have.
At the time I was employed by an international humanitarian assistance agency. There, we talked a lot about protein, nutrition and hydration. They are the ABCs of basic human needs. Nutrition is the first to go out during war, poverty and crisis. They are the first to come in through assistance programs, both in short-term relief and long-term development. The key is protein.
- High protein biscuits are distributed in refugee camps.
- Instant protein comes from fresh milk of cows for families in farm co-ops.
- Extra protein grows in the ponds of fish farms.
- More protein is what many people still need.
I once visited a tilapia farm in Honduras that stocked an extra bonus of snails. “More protein,” the farmer told me as I ate an orange freshly picked from the tree next to the pond, juice rolling down my chin. I didn’t need protein. Plus, at the time I had no understanding how critical protein is for the human body. In hindsight I realize protein is one of those things you don’t know you need until you don’t have it. That farmer knew his community needed protein.
I would discover that the main reason Bob couldn’t hold food or water was because his protein levels were low. He could drink gallons of water and mounds of food a day (not that he was even close to this capacity, but hypothetically) and he would still be dehydrated and emaciated because there were no proteins to “grab” the fluids and nutrition. That’s how one doctor described it to me. It was a conundrum that asked the question, which comes first, the protein or the food?
While Bob’s illness was not based on lack of resources, I offer his story on World Food Day as a way to humanize the complexities of malnutrition and health. I hope it can begin to humanize mind-boggling data, as provided by Bread for the World:
- Each year, 2.6 million children die as a result of hunger-related causes.
- We live in the world’s wealthiest nation. Yet 14.3 percent of U.S. households – a total of 49.1 million Americans, including 15.8 million children – struggle to put food on the table.
- More than one in five American children are at risk of hunger.
We need to be disturbed by these facts but not paralyzed. Through ELCA World Hunger, Lutherans have collaborated to build an enormously effective human service infrastructure to make a difference. You’ve heard the old adage – give someone a fish and they eat for a day; teach someone to fish and they eat for a lifetime. The ELCA has added another line: Gain rights to the fishing pond and the entire community eats.
In the depths of Bob’s illness we didn’t know if his body would heal or continue to deteriorate. We came to know that either way, we were given a lifeline through the love of neighbors, friends and family. One day, in the fifth month of Bob’s illness, without fanfare, something happened. I sat down next to Bob to spoon into his mouth a wee bit of pear and he plucked the eating tool out of my hand. He served himself as if he hadn’t been aware that I’d been spoon-feeding him for months. I was stunned. That’s when I knew his liver had turned toward healing, ever so slowly but certainly.
Ironically, these days Bob and I find ourselves in the category of people I once envied, the ones who struggle to lose weight. Our protein levels are fantastic and I know, without even counting the grams, are an indicator of our riches. I almost can’t believe there was a time when I had to spoon feed half an egg to Bob. But when there’s a crisis, you do what you can. And you get by with a lot of help from others.
Terri Mork Speirs is a writer and mother as well as a grant writer for Children & Families of Iowa.
