A/N: Hey! Back for chapter two. I'm sorry it's been so long since I've posted on either of my stories. I have definitely not given up on IHYD either. I've been working on this story in a way I haven't done one before. I'm writing it in one long document and fitting my scenes in where they belong rather than writing it sequentially so when I finally have the "next" chapter done, I'm posting it. Chapter three is already pretty much finished, so look for it soon!
This chapter has a bit of stuff to maybe explain the past, I hope it helps.
Please read and review if you feel like it!
Oh, and I know this might be a bit of a distasteful story to be writing for a few reasons, but I'm doing it anyway, because like I said before, it's been bugging me for a very long time. I may change my mind in the future, but not today.
Here we go!
When she woke up the next morning, Lisa Cuddy was feeling awful. She was exhausted because she had gotten less than two hours of sleep, and her head was killing her from last night's crying. She knew, though, that staying in bed and simply reliving last night in her memory over and over again wouldn't help her to work through what had occurred, so she dragged herself out of bed.
She gave her normal morning yoga routine a good try. She really did. It wasn't helping at all today. Her thoughts and emotions were so all over the place that it completely threw off her internal balance. This, in turn, caused her physical balance to become frustratingly unstable. Normally she would spend between ninety minutes and two hours doing yoga in the morning but today she got through a whopping forty minutes before throwing in the towel. After giving up, she decided to put on a pot of coffee and try to get some work done before Rachel woke up.
She was sitting on the couch in the living room staring blankly at what she was supposed to be reading. The problem was that she didn't see anything on the page. All she could see were the images from last night. It was some time later that she found tears again creating damp tracks down her cheeks.
She wiped the wet spots off of her face when she heard Rachel running down the hallway and pulled herself up off of the couch. Finally she had something to do that would help to occupy her racing thoughts. Together they got ready for work and school.
It was when the two sat down to breakfast that her thoughts finally completely returned to the previous topic. She watched Rachel eat soggy fruit loops out of her bowl with her fingers and then turned her gaze downward to her own plate of sliced fruit. To be truthful, she really was a bit hungry. She hadn't actually digested much of last night's meal. She picked up a piece of apple and twirled it between her fingers absently. She couldn't help worrying that if she ate the apple, she would feel the need to purge. She wouldn't do that again, of that she was sure, but what if she felt compelled? Could she handle that? Of course, not eating the apple would be restriction and that was also something she wouldn't do. In the end she decided to eat the apple.
One slice was all it took to break her resolve about eating the apple. She felt the wetness of tears trailing down her face again.
"Mommy, are you sad?"
Lisa looked at her daughter. "Yes honey, I am sad."
"Why?" Her daughter was always curious about everything.
"It's nothing you need to worry about. Spending time with you is already making me happier." Rachel smiled.
Cuddy was frustrated. She needed to get her work done but House was lingering in her office for no reason that she could identify. He didn't need her permission for any procedures because he currently didn't have a patient. She had told him to go find a patient. He didn't. She told him to go work in the clinic. He wouldn't. She was at the end of her rope. She didn't need this today. She wasn't listening as he talked.
Finally she shook her head and interrupted him. "Damn it, House. I don't give a crap what the hell it is you are not doing, just don't not do it in my office!" she practically screamed.
"Geez, Cuddy. I haven't seen you this irritable since med school. You're not puking again, are you?" he joked.
Cuddy froze. He knows. How could he know? He can't possibly know. She stood just inches away from him and stared into his eyes with a look even he knew meant he had crossed a line. "Go to Hell, House," she said before turning away from him. A few seconds later she heard her door click shut.
She couldn't breathe. Her hands managed to find their way to the edge of her desk and she leaned onto it in order to stay upright. Her vision quickly darkened and part of her understood that at this moment she was actually hyperventilating. It was less than a second later she felt strong hands grip her arm for support. "Don't you dare touch me," she choked out.
The hands let go of her arm. "I'm sorry. Are you ok?"
The voice didn't belong to House as she had assumed it would. Rather, it was Wilson. She reached a hand out behind her, reaching towards him. He gently took her hand and guided her over to her couch. "What did he do to you?" he asked when her breathing and heart rate finally started to calm down.
"I haven't had an anxiety attack in years."
"Are you starting to feel better?" She nodded slowly. "What did he do?"
Cuddy was still fighting tremors in her hands. "You, you didn't hear what he said?"
Wilson shook his head. "No, I didn't, but you can tell me."
"I'd really rather not." She trusted him dearly and he was her best friend, but there are some things about her past that she wanted to keep private regardless of their close relationship. It was bad enough that House knew. It would be impossible for him not to know considering she had found out when she came back after her semester off that there were few people who hadn't known thanks to one of her asshole roommates and her loose lips. In retrospect, though, if it hadn't been for the intervention of sorts by her roommates, she wouldn't be the person she was today. Wilson, though, he didn't have to know.
She couldn't stop the tears from falling down her face for the third time that morning. Wilson placed a comforting palm on her back. "That's fine. You don't have to."
Her tears started falling harder. "Once, that's it. It's not going to happen again. I won't let it happen again. It won't be the same as last time."
Wilson was utterly lost. Finally a thought hit him. "Are you trying to have another baby?" he asked softly.
"God no," she muttered. That was the last thing on her mind. For just a split second she wondered where that thought had come from before she thought of a possible answer. Shit. Had her body really gotten that out of control that people thought she was pregnant? "Why?"
"It's just the last time I saw you like this you were upset over a comment he made about your ability to parent and you projected it onto your feelings about your…" he wasn't sure what the best way to finish that sentence was.
"You can say it; infertility is just one of the 171,476 words in the dictionary."
"It's just what you said about not letting it happen again, I was thinking you might be referring to another miscarriage. I'm sorry for assuming."
She tried to wipe a few tears out of her eye with her hand. "It's ok, don't worry about it." The more rational part of her irrational brain told her that she should be relieved because of his answer, but it was completely overridden by the irrational part of the already irrational brain which knew that once the idea of where she had originally thought his idea had come from had been planted in her brain, it wouldn't leave.
"This is a completely unrelated matter," she stated even though she knew, deep down, the two might not actually be as unrelated as she wished. True, she hadn't spent all those years in a state of starvation, but she had still been screwing around with her body chemistry for long enough to have possible lasting effects including infertility.
When Cuddy had finally mostly calmed down Wilson let go of her. "I was actually coming by to see if you wanted to grab some lunch from the cafeteria with me," he started.
Inwardly she groaned. Today of all days? It's like the planets had aligned just right to make her insane. She had to figure out a way out of this. "I'd really rather not go down there looking like this." She gestured to her red, puffy eyes and tearstained cheeks. Sure, she could redo her makeup, but that wouldn't help her eyes any.
"Oh, that's not a problem. If you want, I could bring something back here for you."
Now she was in a tricky spot. If she refused his offer there was a good chance he would go running to House and then House would probably pretty easily pick up on what had happened last night between the lunch and her earlier reaction to him. "Yeah, I guess that would be ok."
"What would you like?"
She thought. What would the easiest thing to work with be? "I guess just a salad. I really don't have much of an appetite after all the crying I just did."
"Sure thing, I'll be back soon." With that, Wilson left.
The rest of the day went pretty much as usual after lunch. Chatting about innocuous things with Wilson had actually raised her spirits considerably. Cuddy dealt with the usual messages from the board as well as numerous ridiculous requests from House's team for the duration of the work day. When the day was finally over, she managed to get to sleep without much trouble due to the fact that she had barely slept the night before.
The next morning life was back to normal for her. That is, until about a week later when it had happened again. Like the first time, she hadn't even thought about doing it, she just did it. She rationalized this away. I did it once and there weren't any consequences, she thought to herself. I'm sure there won't be any this time either. What she couldn't see, or maybe didn't want to see, was that being able to rationalize the second purge was actually a consequence of having done it in the first place.
Over the course of the next two months things only got worse. She would pull out anything she possibly could to attempt to excuse or justify her behaviors to herself. The frequency of her purging increased dramatically and on a few occasions she had engaged in full binges. During this time she also found she had become increasingly fixated on body image and weight, which was a rather new thing for her. In the past it was simply a non-issue. She had really been pretty comfortable with her image throughout her life.
It was after one particularly long and stressful day that she found herself awake at three in the morning. Forcing herself to bed, she fell into a fitful sleep. Rather than having dreams, the images in her mind were actual memories from her past.
She had been summoned to the campus health office and she had a feeling of dread looming over her like a dark cloud. She had an idea what this was going to be about due to recent events. "Lisa Cuddy. I have an appointment," she announced after approaching the front desk.
The woman at the desk gestured to a set of chairs against the far wall. Several minutes later the woman answered the phone and then spoke. "Please follow me."
She was led down a short hallway and into a room with a small sofa and several chairs. "Please take a seat."
She sat down on an uncomfortable chair and waited anxiously. She thought of possible alternatives for her summons but only came up with ones she knew were impossible, like having forgotten something vital on a health form this semester.
After an eternity, the door opened and a man and three women walked into the room. She stood as they came in. The man offered his hand to her to shake. She tried her best to wipe the sweat off of her palm onto her pant leg before briefly returning the handshake. Now she was absolutely sure about the reason she had been called here. It didn't take four people to correct a mistake on a physical form.
"Miss Cuddy," one of the women began, "It has come to our attention that there have been some concerns about your health recently." Lisa simply sat emotionless, staring at the quartet. Unphased, the woman continued. "We have reason to believe that you may be suffering from an eating disorder." This, of course, was not news to Lisa and she continued to sit and stare. "We understand that as a medical student you are under a great deal of stress, and sometimes students can develop unhealthy coping mechanisms. We also know that with therapy and other counseling, Bulimia Nervosa, especially with early intervention, has a good recovery rate."
She couldn't keep her straight face anymore. She burst out into a strange kind of laughter for a moment, surprising everybody in the room. "How early do YOU consider early intervention? I certainly don't consider 'twelve years later' being particularly prompt if you ask me," she finished, managing to reign in her laughter.
This was, apparently, the absolute wrong thing to say, and she immediately noticed the woman pause and change tactics. "We are going to have to insist that you withdraw from the current term. You will be allowed to reenroll in the January term provided you meet these requirements." Lisa read over the list of requirements which were on the typed sheet she had been handed, not the least of which required a written letter from a certified eating disorder program documenting that she had been evaluated, treated, and discharged to outpatient care. "We will also require you to be off campus by the day after tomorrow for liability purposes."
Lisa was in shock. She had known coming in here that this would be bad, but she had no idea. At the moment the only thought she had was what to tell her parents. Without saying anything she walked out of the health center and back to her apartment in a daze.
After three hours locked in her room away from the prying eyes of her roommates, whom she was sure had ratted her out, she worked up the courage to call her parents and tell them she had to come home.
Just after the third ring her sister picked up. "Hello?"
"Hey Jules," she started in as normal a tone as she could. "I need to talk to mom."
"Ok, hold on a sec."
Her mother came to the phone. "Hello, Lisa."
It was now or never, and unfortunately, never wasn't an option. "Hi mom," was all she got out before the tears hit full force.
"Lisa, honey, what's wrong?"
"I, I need to come home. Soon. Tomorrow actually."
"Why? What's wrong?"
"I… it was… well, my roommates…" Now that she was finally making the call the words wouldn't come.
"Lisa, what did they do to you?"
"They… well, actually, I did it. All they did was talk."
"Talk about what?"
"They told some people at the health center that I was sick."
"So they're sending you all the way home because you have a cold?"
"I don't have a cold. I was throwing up."
"So they're sending you home because you have a stomach virus."
Lisa let out an exacerbated sigh. "For the love of God, Ma, I wasn't physically sick."
It took her mother a moment to process the information before she started back in. "Lisa! What in all that is holy is wrong with you? You stopped that! You got better!"
Lisa was crying about as hard as she ever had and started to shout at her mother and was feeling the onset of an anxiety attack, which was something she had come to know the feeling of quite well over the years. "No, mom, I didn't get BETTER, I just got BETTER at hiding it and lying about it. Obviously I didn't get good enough to hide it from, and lie about it, to five nosy grad students." Lisa waited for what felt like an eternity for her mother to respond. "Mom, please, just say something already."
"I don't know what to say, Lisa. I guess I'm just disappointed."
"Gee, I'm sorry I'm not the perfect daughter you always wanted me to be. Good thing you've still got Julia."
"Honey, that's not what I meant, you know that. I need to talk to your father and we'll make arrangements for you to fly home tomorrow. Will you be ok if I call you back a bit later?"
"Yeah, not like I have much of a choice."
"I'll call you later. Bye."
"Bye."
After regaining control of her breathing, Lisa began to pack her belongings when there was a knock on her bedroom door followed by the tentative words of one of her roommates. "Lisa? Are you ok?"
Lisa paused her packing. "Of course I'm not ok. You got me kicked out. I'm leaving tomorrow. You got what you wanted; just leave me the hell alone."
"Lisa, that's not what we wanted. We just wanted to help."
Help. Right. "You've helped, now fuck off."
"I'm sorry."
The rest of the night she was left alone in her room waiting for the call from her parents.
Early the next afternoon she was greeted at the airport by her mother and sister. Julia walked up to her and gave her an extended hug. During this she whispered into her ear. "I'm sorry I never confronted you about this sooner. Maybe this could have been avoided."
Lisa pulled back. "You didn't know it was going on still, it's not your fault."
"Lise, I knew the whole time." She got a confused look in response. "Parents see what they want to believe. Sisters see the truth. I'm sorry."
"Like I said, it's not your fault." Together they walked to the car.
It wasn't far into the drive when Lisa made the startling realization that they were not headed home. She looked to Julia next to her. "We're not going back to the house," she stated.
"No, we aren't," her mother answered. "You have an intake appointment at Devon at four."
Lisa was angry. "I can't even spend a night in my own bed?"
Her mother, however, remained completely cool. "I can only imagine what you do in your down time and I am not going to let you do those things for one more night. This stops right now."
Julia reached over and grabbed her sister's hand to try to reassure her that things would be ok, but it was little comfort.
Lisa was sitting on one of the couches impatiently tapping her foot on the floor as she was reading through a new chapter in an endocrinology text. She had taken a liking to the field and was thinking about making it her specialty, but she hadn't decided yet. It wasn't long before a number of women ranging from about fourteen years old to about forty came out from down the hallway talking and joined her in the room. A girl in her late teens sat down near her.
"Why are you here?" the girl asked. Lisa rolled her eyes and put her text off to the side. Clearly the girl was just being an ass because everybody was here for the same reason. "I didn't have much of a choice."
"You don't look like you belong here."
"Believe me, I'm grateful that my bones are on the inside of my skin instead of where yours are," she retorted.
"It's better than being a hippopotamus."
Lisa was starting to get annoyed with the girl. She stood up and gestured to herself. "This is what a woman is supposed to look like, you know."
"You just keep telling yourself that, Bingie."
Lisa went from annoyed to pissed in a nanosecond after that insult. She moved to take a swing at the girl but in her pissed off state somehow managed to miss leaving the girl with the opportunity to lunge at her. Caught completely off guard, Lisa found herself underneath the girl on the floor. She could never claim to be very good at anything physical (at least, not this kind of physical); she wasn't coordinated, she wasn't strong, and she certainly wasn't athletic, but she did have a significant weight advantage over the emaciated anorexic, and she took it.
She easily reversed their positions. Now she was leaning over the girl and had her legs pinned down underneath her own and her arms pinned to the floor by her right hand. She glared into her eyes like a predator.
"What are you going to do now, kiss me?" the girl taunted.
"Sorry, bitch, I like to drive stick," she said before landing a punch squarely into the girl's jaw.
By this point the commotion had attracted the attention of not only the other patients but a number of the staff as well. Lisa was pulled off of the girl and "escorted" to her room before the door was locked.
She was a caged animal. She didn't belong here. She was pacing the length of the room, stopping occasionally to hammer the door with her fists. Her breathing became labored as her legs turned to jelly and her head started swimming. Great, an anxiety attack.
The door unlocked and the doctor and two aides came in. The doctor was holding a syringe. "You're not sedating me," she said flatly.
"No, I'm not," he agreed. "This is just Ativan to help you calm down. The first few days here can be difficult and I can see you are having some trouble adjusting."
It was nearly impossible for her to think about the situation clearly through the fog and the feeling of her racing heart so she instead focused on the medical knowledge she could access. "Ativan. Lorazapam. Schedlue IV drug. Administered orally or intravenously. You're not getting a vein."
The doctor moved closer. "I can see that you've gotten a pharmacology course or two already, and I am getting a vein."
In her current state she didn't have the physical strength to fight back when one of the aides pulled her arm up and held it steady for the doctor to inject the medication. After a few seconds she could actually feel her body begin to calm down and she was actually thankful for that, not that she would ever admit that to them. He hadn't given her enough to sedate her, just enough to help her calm down. Probably 0.5-1mg.
"Dinner will be in about twenty minutes. Please come out by then. I expect there to be no more confrontations like that." She opened her mouth preparing to defend herself. "I am well aware that Del is an instigator, but you are responsible for your own actions and responses." The three others then left her alone in the room.
Lisa woke up and surveyed the darkness of her bedroom while remembering that hard time period. She recalled how for nearly two weeks she had fought the program and willingly created as much trouble as she could in order to get kicked out. Then there was the day when during one of her meetings with the doctor he said something to her.
"You want to be a doctor, but you want this too. You can't have it both ways. Unless you succeed in this program, you will not be allowed back into your medical school. Unless you succeed with this program, you will not be allowed back into ANY medical school. You know that's the truth. This is on your record and it will stay there."
For the first time ever she understood the gravity of the situation. After that, things slowly started to change.
As she lay in the darkness she realized that she was again in a similar position. Something had to change. She couldn't have this and the life she wants. She needed a plan.
The next day she thought about things she liked to do. She wanted to find something to occupy her in the evenings, which was when she ran into problems. The only things she really had in her life were her work and Rachel. Obviously, neither of those were helping her in a way she needed. She could put all of her energy and love into her daughter, but as soon as Rachel went to sleep around seven every night, she could no longer handle the feeling of being utterly alone. She considered putting more hours into her work at the hospital but decided that was stupid since her job was already stressing her out enough. She even thought about offering to teach a night course at Princeton University's medical school, but she didn't think she had the energy to put into that.
Her mind then turned to leisure activities. When she was younger she always wished she could do something artistic. She had taken a drawing class once but had ended up extremely frustrated with her inability to produce anything up to her high standards of satisfaction. A smile crossed her face as she toyed with the idea of taking up kick boxing. She had always done whatever she could to turn her aggressive tendencies away from physical aggression and towards something more useful like her career. It worried her to think what might happen if the rubber band around her aggression snapped and she ended up killing somebody by accident. She needed something to help focus her energies rather than disperse them throughout the room.
That was actually something she had already found all those years ago when she had taken up yoga. It had been twenty years since she had done it anywhere other than her own home, but maybe she would give it a go somewhere else. This was finally the idea she settled on.
She found a place nearby that had group classes in the style she was familiar with in the evenings. She figured if she tried to go two or three evenings a week it might help. Her next task was to find a sitter for Rachel. She hated the idea of leaving Rachel with yet another sitter. She knew that her work took her away from her daughter more than she wanted it to, but she also knew that while she engaged in her symptoms she was no more there for her daughter than she would be if she were somewhere else. If she could just get a handle on her problems she could be the mom she strived to be. Somewhat reluctantly, she started interviewing potential sitters.
She went about this in a similar way with which she went about hiring new doctors for her hospital. After nearly two dozen interviews and a few background checks, she hired Tracie. Tracie was a physics major at Princeton. She also had the benefit of growing up the oldest of five siblings, so she had plenty of experience with children.
Lisa came home a little earlier on the first night she was to go to class. She gave Rachel a bath and then made some dinner. As she was sitting down to her own dinner she had a thought. If she ate and then immediately went to do yoga, between all of the downward dog and folded postures and then the inversions, she was likely to vomit without even trying and that would defeat the purpose of distracting herself in the first place, so she opted to just save the dinner for when she got home. She put Rachel to bed a half hour early after Tracie had arrived.
She thoroughly enjoyed the class. When she arrived home she felt calm and peaceful. It was wonderful. As she walked through the house the idea of what to do about her uneaten dinner came to mind. To be perfectly honest, she really did feel very good and she really didn't want to ruin her mood by having to deal with the whole "food thing", so she simply took a bath and then went to sleep.
This became her pattern on the days she went out at night. She considered these to be her good days. On the rest of the days, she was simply stuck to her old pattern. She felt it was good, though, because she figured she was doing less of the undesirable behaviors and more things which were good for her. She was finally more at peace than she had been in months.