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Health & Fitness

Fundraiser to Save Local Teen from Eating Disorders

Her muscles clenched up. She couldn't use them. The paralysis moved to her face, her mouth. She couldn't move, she couldn't talk. It hurt so much!

Her muscles clenched up.

She couldn’t use them.  The
paralysis moved to her face, her mouth.
She couldn’t move, she couldn’t talk.
It hurt so much!

This was part of Tacoma teen Sarah Feiss’ (an alias; all other info and images are accurate) most recent Sunday.  She didn’t regain use of her muscles until she was fed broth and had her muscles rubbed down.

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Labs the next day showed that the potassium levels in her bloodstream had dropped so low that her muscles had literally frozen up, and she was at risk for a heart attack. They also showed kidneys that were at risk of shutting down due to dehydration.  She was immediately hospitalized.

What was causing all of this?  Sarah suffers from bulimia, as well as symptoms of anorexia.  Eating Disorders are often dismissed as a teenage girl problem, nothing to be taken seriously.  But Eating Disorders have the highest mortality rates of any psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.  They kill via heart and vital organ failure due to malnutrition, as well as through extremely high suicide rates. (ANAD.org, http://www.anad.org/get-information/about-eating-disorders/eating-disord...)

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By throwing up any and all food she’d eaten day after day, month after month,
Sarah had depleted her body of vital electrolytes. Through the constant bingeing and purging that characterize bulimia, Sarah had been destroying her body.

As with sufferers of other psychiatric disorders, like depression or OCD, Sarah has little control over her mental-illness-related actions:  she can recognize the harm she is doing to her body by purging, yet the anxiety she feels if she doesn’t purge is so overwhelmingly painful that it is as if she doesn’t have a choice. It is because of this dynamic that sufferers of Eating Disorders desperately need intensive treatment, usually at a specialized facility for several weeks or months at a time.

Unfortunately, that treatment is often very expensive.  In Sarah’s case, it will cost her parents $3600 above and beyond what their military health insurance will cover, $3600 that they don’t have.

Her friends and family have organized a fundraiser through the crowdfunding website indiegogo.com in order to raise the funds needed to send Sarah to a treatment center.

Anyone interested in donating can visit the site, http://igg.me/at/eating-disorders-kill-please-save-sarah/x/2431572.

All we ask for is $30; if 130 people donate $30, we will raise the money needed to get Sarah to treatment.   

Sarah is loving and kind, brilliant and curious, passionate, and fun-loving. She is a local girl, 19 years old.  She is dearly loved by her friends and family.  We would be so grateful for any and all support!

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