Out of Mental Health Hospitals and Into Motherhood: A Story of Overcoming

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Power iHeartRadio Jingle Ball coming live from New York to the CW app and CWtv.com on December 9th. Passing the ball is fun. The Frito-Lay Pass the Ball Challenge is more fun. Join Frito-Lay, the official USA snack of the FIFA World Cup 2022, for their Pass the Ball Challenge. Add your picture to the Golden World Soccer Ball and be part of a one-of-a-kind experience. Then, pass the ball to friends for a chance to score custom swag. Grab a specially marked bag of Lay's, Cheetos, or Doritos and scan the QR code or visit FritoLayScore.com. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories and we tell stories about everything here on this show including your story.

Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. They're some of our favorites and up next we have the story of a young woman named Randy Wilson. This is her story.

It starts with an eating disorder and goes straight to motherhood and Chrissy brings us this story and it begins with Randy Wilson. So I ended up moving to Florida and I lived with this aunt of mine and she lived in a retirement community. So I was down there by myself. I didn't have anyone that I knew and I didn't make friends right off the bat and that's abnormal for me because I'm just I'm really bubbly. I'm outspoken.

I'm an extrovert. I wasn't doing good in school. My grades started to slip.

I was not praying every day like I used to. It kind of just brought me more into a depression. So my aunt Alice introduced me to a family friend of hers who had a son who was around my age. So we hit it off right away and next thing you know we started dating and he was really into fitness and CrossFit and very kind of obsessive over nutrition and exercise and I've always been small. I've been petite my entire life so I wasn't really too concerned with my weight.

I guess being around him so much and him talking about everything then I suddenly felt the need to get on that ball too. I started putting more attention and focus on getting fit and starting to go to the gym and paying more attention to nutrition and what I was eating but I've never done that before so I didn't really know the healthy way to do that so I just started going at it with what I assumed was the healthy way. I was like okay well I'll just start going to the gym and eating less. About a week into starting that habit I started seeing results in my body and I was like hey I have lost weight and the guy I was with noticed too. He would always comment on like look how little you are.

That all just encouraged it even more. We did end up breaking up but at that point a snowball had already started to roll. I have kind of a addictive personality. What I mean by that is if I did like two hours at the gym one day then the next day I have to do two hours or more. I have to at least match the same amount of time and the same amount of exercise that I did while I was there.

So I kind of shut down. Normally I would go to God with stuff like that but I don't know for some reason I didn't and I ended up just kind of putting all my focus into this new hobby that I'd already started which was going to the gym and next thing I knew I was going to the gym four times a week for like two and a half hours and then the diet thing started taking a turn for the worse as well. At first I was just eating healthy but then this game started coming into my head. I would try to exert as many calories as I was taking in. At this point I was trying to eat just simply egg whites all the time and vegetables and I was still going to the gym and working out and I was starting to look sickly.

We ended up coming home for Christmas that December. My body just plummeted, my health at least. My weight dropped to the 70s. My heart was starting to slow down a lot and like I had no energy at all. I remember walking up the steps at my grandmother's house because that's where we went for Christmas and I felt like my legs were going to give out on every single step that I took. I was cold all the time.

I started growing hair all over my arms and my legs and I was losing hair from my head. I couldn't shiver anymore and my teeth couldn't chatter but I was cold all the time. It was then that Randy's parents intervened. So at that point my mom had no other choice than to put me in inpatient facility at a hospital in Chapel Hill. I was very reluctant about going to Chapel Hill. I knew I was going to put on weight and the idea of my clothes not fitting me anymore terrified me.

So it took a lot. I did pray about that one. My heart had been feeling really weird at that point too because it slowed down so much so I thought maybe this maybe this isn't a bad idea because I don't want to die. So I ended up agreeing to go to Chapel Hill and I gained enough weight to go to step down back into day treatment. Randy eventually left treatment and returned to college but there she spiraled back into her eating disorder. A friend of mine came up and she noticed my unhealthy habits starting to pick back up and she actually called my mom and told her to come and get me that I wasn't doing well and that was sick again. My mom and dad came up and surprised me and told me I was moving out and that I had to go back to day treatment. I didn't have to go to end treatment this time but I did go to a residential treatment center in Durham and that's when I would say my recovery finally really began.

So we have a therapist in residential treatment that pretty much grants you your rights. I asked my therapist if I could attend a bible study because I told her that you know my faith has always been really important to me and I think it might help me. She said okay sure but we have to make sure we have enough people to take you to a bible study. Tuesday night came around so one of the RPAs came up and said okay we need so and so and so and so and Randy to line up to head out and I was like is there a bible study on Tuesday? Then she said it was for an AA meeting and then they told me that my therapist had considered it close enough to a bible study because it's based off of biblical principles. So then I started going to AA meetings every Tuesday. Thursdays were in AA meetings which is Narcotics Anonymous and I jumped on the bandwagon for that one too.

At first I thought it was really funny and I just wanted to use it as my excuse to get out of the house but honestly I started listening to all the stories that people would share and they started hitting me in a deep way. And you're listening to Randy Wilson and her journey from an eating disorder and ultimately to motherhood and my goodness there's a lot to unpack there but it can happen to anybody and this is the kind of thing that's affecting so many young and older women and now increasingly men and when we come back we're going to continue this story the story of Randy Wilson and by the way if you have stories like it of overcoming in the end as we do a lot of overcoming stories send them again to OurAmericanStories.com. Randy Wilson's story, a journey of overcoming an eating disorder, more of this story here on Our American Stories. Folks if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do we're asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country please make a donation. A monthly gift of $17.76 is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming.

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To learn more visit Bose.com. And we return to our American stories and to Randy Wilson's story. She'd been battling an eating disorder and soon found herself attending AA and NA meetings. At first it was a way to get out of the house but then the story she heard at these meetings inspired her to begin her own recovery. People share stories about how they've lost their family, how their kids don't talk to them and I thought you know I'm so selfish because all these people are trying really hard to get back on their feet and they've experienced such traumatic things in life. If they can do this and they can start really trying to step up their game and get themselves better then I need to start doing the same thing because I'm just going to end up going to AA and NA meetings for my entire life and living in a treatment center. The final piece to Randy's recovery came a few months later.

It was around Thanksgiving we went to this church service and there's these two little girls they're wearing like these Christmas dresses they have long curly hair and I just imagined like I want to be a mom. I wanted to make it to being a mom and seeing my little girls grow up and raising kids and having a husband and having a career and to be proud of and I realized in that moment if I keep doing this I'm never going to have that. I can keep getting myself better and then getting sick again forever until my body just finally gives out. I think that was the final push to really start trying to get better. After her realization Randy worked hard to recover and managed to leave treatment within a few months.

Once she recovered Randy decided to finish college online. I was much happier with that I moved back home with my family in Charlotte and then I met the man who is now my husband. When I first met Ben I again kind of started to get that feeling the need to impress.

I started kind of dieting again and paying a lot of close attention to what I was eating and I did start exercising a lot again because I just wanted to be thin and beautiful. I started to do a little bit of a spiral. He noticed what was going on. He knew my history.

I had already shared with him the whole story of what had happened. As soon as he started noticing that it was happening again he gave me basically a set of rules. He said okay look if you get in the 80s that I will personally put you into treatment. He gave me a lot more freedom though than I had ever received with it and if he came in on me doing some sort of exercise I immediately felt this sense of shame and guilt and embarrassment that I'm supposed to that I'm supposed to be better and I'm doing this and I was hiding. We had to sit down and talk about it and I was like you know what okay let's let's put it let's put it to this.

I'm either I'm going to set up what workout I'm doing every day and I only can do that workout and let's not go out of it and I kind of put Ben to hold me accountable. So I gave my weight back got to a healthy weight then Ben and I got married. It was the happiest time of my life. But there was one problem Randy couldn't get pregnant. I lost my menstrual cycle in 2012 when I first started losing weight so we reached the year 2020 and I still hadn't had a period so now it's been eight years and I remember my gynecologist telling me over the phone because we couldn't meet in person anymore so he said uh you know Randy I hate to say it but if it's been eight years I really I don't think it's coming back.

We're gonna have to figure out another way to get you pregnant. I was devastated and I just cried and cried because at this point I'd been at a healthy weight for at least two three years and I didn't understand why it hadn't come back. So we started seeing an endocrinologist who basically told me he thought that I could get my period back still. He believed that I could but to lay off of basically to do no exercise which for me was a huge challenge because yes I had overcome the obsession of exercise and the addiction to it but that was only because I had my little hour. I relied on that hour to not go into a obsessive snowball effect and overdoing it but I did quit um I did quit exercising. I just started walking.

I started going on walks just praying to God please don't let this be all in vain. That took every bit of I mean it wasn't me it was God. God had to give him this dream. In the middle of the George Floyd riots and the protests Ben had been sent out to do CEU.

He goes out and basically just has to stand out there make sure that nothing goes too crazy in the city. He would come home around three or four in the morning. I was stressed out to the absolute max. I was so upset over everything that was going on between COVID and worrying about Ben and randomly I started my period back on like the second night. It was a complete miracle and I called my gynecologist and he was shocked and I also called the endocrinologist and so at that point we were like okay well let's start trying for babies and I'd gone to see the endocrinologist several times. I had three periods. He said that my follicles were not growing in the female body or the follicles hold the egg and they have to grow to a certain size in order for the egg to be able to be fertilized and so he was basically saying that your follicles aren't growing and he said he didn't know if it was they were ever going to grow. So I was like that's unfortunate because fertility drugs are not covered by insurance and we were trying to figure out that financially and how that was going to work. We had just gotten enough money to do one of the fertility drugs and I called them too late apparently because you're supposed to start taking it at the beginning of your cycle and so they said okay just wait and you know just call us back at your next one. I started not feeling well and having headaches and everything and having headaches and everything and lo and behold I was pregnant. That was the greatest miracle I have ever received in my life. It is such a blessing that I was given this opportunity to have a baby. Once you've already made that choice like to deprive your body of nutrition for so long it's so hard for your body to be forgiving.

One of the other specialists we saw said that it just wasn't going to happen because the body is unforgiving when it comes to malnutrition. After I met my husband and I told him the whole story of what had happened he said to me that he looked at my story as a gift and it gave me even more motivation to overcome any other battles that I may face so that I could use this gift that God had given me to bring honor and glory to him and by doing so helping to bring others that were suffering others that have struggled and bring them to his love so they can experience the life that I'm now beginning to step foot into. Noah is going to be here in about a month and honestly my number one priority is to be the best mom that I can be to her. I want to love her unconditionally as the Lord has loved me unconditionally and how he has shown that to me. I do plan to share my story with her eventually and hopefully prevent her from ever going through or experiencing anything like that. I know that Noah will certainly experience you know her own struggles throughout life but I want to be I want to be there for her and I feel like God created strength in me through my experiences so that I can be here be there for her. Randy hopes to write a book about her struggles drawing from a diary she kept while in treatment. This is one entry she wanted to share. This excerpt is from the last journal entry that I wrote while I was at inpatient care in the hospital at Chapel Hill.

I wrote this on March 5th of 2013. Everyone has their own story, their own battles they face. My survival thus far provides hope and assurance in overcoming the inevitable challenges that lie ahead. The people we meet, the things we see, the troubles we encounter all play significant roles in molding thoughts opinions and beliefs.

It is our job to graciously welcome them as gifts. We never stop learning. And a special thanks to Chrissy for producing that story and thanks to Randy Wilson for sharing her story with us and it's important for these stories to be shared and we love doing these kind of things because in the end it can ease someone else's pain and also provide a pain provide a pathway to hope for them as well. If they can do this she said of the people at AA and NA overcome their obstacles in life and their obsessions and addictions I need to do the same thing. And my goodness the story of how she lost her menstrual cycle and then got it back and then became a mother. Well it's just beautiful and she's so right the body is unforgiving when it comes to malnutrition.

Malnutrition can cause all kinds of long-term damage. The story of Randy Wilson's overcoming here on Our American Stories. So you never became a soccer star but you could still show out during the FIFA World Cup 2022 with cool soccer swag from Frito-Lay the official USA snack of the FIFA World Cup 2022. Look for the Golden World Soccer Ball then pass the ball to fellow fans for a chance to score custom swag. Scan the QR code on specially marked bags of Leis, Cheetos or Doritos or visit FritoLayScore.com to join the pass the ball challenge.

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