Panic Fading

I am starting to feel a little less in danger of spontaneously combusting. I got moved into my office (I have an office!) today, and having my own "space" on campus is a big comfort. I share it with one other grad student, who happens to be the HOTTEST guy I have seen in the department so far. He is also in the class that I had this morning. Hmmm. And he has pictures of his family on his desk in the office, but there are no wifey looking people. Hmmm.

Grad school classes are awesome. Well, I've only had one official class as of yet, the rest don't meet until next week, but so far so good. My professor brought coffee for everyone today, and told us that worrying about grades is a distraction, so we've all got A's unless we really just go out of our ways to screw up. The material is going to be pretty fascinating, and there are people from a variety of research areas (within our field) in the class, so I think it will be a good experience.

I am going to one of the meet and greet socials tonight, hopefully I will be successful in, well, meeting and greeting people. It is timed such that it doesn't interfere too badly with my routines, and that I can make it home for my own dinner at the usual time. I'm not planning on eating there, but I have no idea what they'll be having, and I've done ok with food on my own today. If I plan to eat there, then I still fall into the pattern of restricting the rest of the day to "save up" for what they might have, and that just doesn't put me in a good place. So that tendency is one thing I need to work on.

Speaking of working on things, some progress in the treatment front today: I had an appointment with my new physician here. Actually, only the nurse practitioner talked to me, but she was great. She spent a lot of time and seemed genuinely interested in me. I told her upfront that the main reason for my appointment was to get a referral to the local ED center. My old doctor kind of glazed over and seemed clueless on the subject of EDs, but she was much more on top of things. When I said "eating disorder," she immediately had a list of questions about my bones, reproductive stuff, water intake, etc etc. She seemed more prepared to deal with the topic than any physician I have dealt with so far.

So, I did that, got stuck with some needles (never mind the tattoo, I HATE needles! I don't even have my ears pierced), and got my referral. I have an appointment at the ED center next week. H. promised to fax over a treatment history, so the new psychologist has a heads-up on what she's getting herself into with me.

I have not done well with food for the past few days leading up to this appointment. I just wanted to make sure that my poundage was "low enough" when they weighed me, even though I know that's an invalid concept for EDs. But with the appointment, combined with desperation to look nice and make good first impressions on my new colleagues this week, has meant crappy food habits. I usually consume vast (probably unhealthy) amounts of water (not to fill up, I'm genuinely that thirsty, might be the workouts, I think I talked about this at some point before), and I even restricted that prior to my appointment this morning and got dehydrated and felt terrible. Probably messed up my urine and blood samples, too, that definitely wasn't representative of my usual state. Getting back on the wagon with food will be a goal for the weekend.

I am feeling better about things today. Now that I have a rough draft of daily schedules in my head, I feel a little bit less like the sky is falling. In my last post I mentioned the challenge of cutting out a signficant chunk of exercise, and I think that is something I'm going to be doing in stages. I don't want to really talk about details here because I don't like outlining my workouts for everyone to judge. I won't end up with any cut out today, but next week will be the first full week of my full schedule, so we'll see how that goes.

Ok, off to try and pretty myself up for this social.