The illness progressed and I became increasingly weak. While someone else cared for my children, I slept eighteen hours a day.

I grew battle-weary. I longed for a normal life and knew my first step would have to be to give up the quest for "thin enough." I resolved to start eating healthy meals again, but soon discovered it would not be easy.

I always felt terribly guilty, defeated, and angry with myself after I ate. One evening after finishing a meal, I was leaving the hospital dining room when I heard a hideous voice inside my head. Full of loathing, it screamed at me, You fat pig! Why did you eat that? You've ruined everything! I had never heard anything like it before. It was very frightening. My doctor knew I was struggling, but I never told her about the enemy in my head.

The harder I worked to get well, the more vocal the hateful being became. No, no, no was all I could hear. I felt like two people in one body, one who wanted to live and another who wanted me dead. I realized I was no longer in control. Someone, or something, had seized my throne and it appeared I was now at its mercy. Each day I became weaker. I tried to eat but often was too tired to even chew.

One afternoon, after realizing I would not live much longer as an anorexic, I found myself looking through my closet for something to wear to my own funeral. I was ready for death--but I was not willing to leave a legacy of pain and torment behind for my husband and children. I knew I had to live for them.

After three years of battling my psychiatrist, I resigned myself to trusting her to tell me how much to weigh and what to eat--no matter what the voices shrieked. In this way I managed to overcome the eating disorder, but the depression remained.

I tried everything the doctor ordered, hoping each new treatment or medication would be the one setting me free. But the depression would always sink its claws deeper into my soul, drawing me away from the edge of the pit, back into the darkness.

As my husband parented our children, I focused on trying to stay alive. I had many hospitalizations during the next six years and my absence was difficult for my family. My eldest daughter, Lauren, asked, "When will you be coming home forever?"

After a total of nine years, twenty different medications, two hundred electro-convulsive treatments, and eighty weeks of hospitalization, I realized if I was ever going to find a cure for my illness, I had to look elsewhere. While home from the hospital, I chose to see a Christian counselor.

Berys was unlike any counselor or therapist I had ever spoken to. "I don't have all the answers," she said, "but the Lord does. He can replace all the no's in your life with yes's!" Through prayer she invited Him into the counseling process, and it was prayer that started my journey toward healing. It was prayer that turned me toward a new direction. Berys also taught me how to listen for God's voice and study His Word.