By Ashley Monckton
Andrea Cooper often picks up the phone in her office only to hear the sound of someone crying.
They are the tears of frightened parents who have just caught their teenage daughter throwing up to lose weight.
“Often they’ll call us because they have no idea where to turn,” she says. “They’ll just be so upset because their daughter is so sick.”
Cooper, 26, works at the Hopewell Eating Disorders Support Centre of Ottawa – the only centre of its kind in the city.
Money is tight and the work seems never ending, but Cooper maintains she won’t leave Hopewell until she feels her job is done.
One of the centre’s services is a help line for people to call and Cooper is frequently the one who answers.
“With eating disorders, it’s a very complicated problem,” says Cooper.
An eating disorder may look like a physical problem, but it’s very much a psychological illness.
Cooper has worked at the non-profit organization, established in 1999, as its only full-time employee for more than a year.
Her work with Hopewell is the latest instalment in a life-long desire to understand what causes a woman to starve herself.
At five foot two, her slight stature tells of her past as a competitive figure skater.
It was her love of figure skating that led her to the University of Ottawa for an undergraduate degree in human kinetics, which is the study of physical activity, sport, and health.
But it was eating behaviours of figure skaters that really fascinated her.
Researching why some athletes are more likely than others to have an eating disorder appealed to Cooper. She wrote her graduate thesis on the influences and causes of disordered eating in elite athletes.
While Cooper says she never had a problem with her eating habits, plenty of young women she skated with did.
“There was a lot of pressure on body image and the way you looked,” she says.
Cooper recalls seeing skaters stuff their faces with candy and fried foods and then train extensively for four or five hours to burn it all off. And while that’s not quite anorexia or bulimia, Cooper says this is often how eating disorders start.
Women, who are more likely than men to have eating disorders, often struggle for years with the illness.
People with eating disorders tend to be perfectionists, says Cooper. Some sufferers develop unrealistic expectations, while others use an eating disorder as an attempt to control their lives.
For many figure skaters, there isn’t time for friends and socializing because of early morning practices and hectic training.
“For a lot of them food was kind of their only reward,” she says. “Everybody just sort of got together and ate.”
Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate out of any form of mental illness – 10 per cent to 20 per cent of sufferers eventually die from complications, according to the Canadian Mental Health Association.
Inside Heartwood House, at 153 Chapel St., the centre isn’t noticeable unless you know what you’re looking for.
Cooper’s office is one of the centre’s two connected rooms, hidden within the building’s main office.
Cooper says she just sort of “fell into” the job. Coming right out of school with little work experience meant a big learning curve.
“You’re pretty well thrown in and expected to swim,” says Joanne Curran, a co-founder of the centre.
Part of her job is to be organized, but Cooper says it comes tnaturally. Her office is neatly arranged, except for a small scattering of papers in front of her computer.
“She has really done an excellent job considering her experience level,” says Curran.
Since all three founders are mothers whose daughters had eating disorders, Cooper says her education brings a new perspective to Hopewell. “I feel like I have something unique to contribute.”
Even so, Cooper says she found some aspects of the job challenging, like answering the help line.
“I definitely have no background in counselling or anything like that. So that was hard getting those really sad calls and you just don’t know what to say.”
But Curran says Cooper has the right combination of warmth and professionalism.
“She’s very empathetic,” says Curran.
Cooper also looks after Hopewell’s limited $100,000 budget. The centre projected a $10,000 deficit for this year, says Cooper, because of reduced funding for eating disorder support and treatment.
So when a slow day comes along, Cooper is busy working on grant requests to help pay the support centre’s costs.
Right now Cooper is working on securing about $10,000 in funding from the United Way.
Each request takes about two weeks to write and she writes about eight to 10 each year – with the odds of getting maybe half of them.
Unfortunately, those slow days are few and far between.
“She oversees pretty well all the services we provide,” says Curran. “She’s the frontline person.”
Cooper manages registration for programs such as therapeutic yoga, which helps improve self-esteem and rebuild physical strength.
She is also out in the community presenting information on eating disorders to organizations and schools in the hope of building awareness.
Heather Trueman, a volunteer who has stood alongside Cooper for many presentations, has known her since she started at Hopewell.
“It would be a very different place without her,” says Trueman. “She attends every event whether it’s a weekend or evening.”
On top of her 40-hour week, most meetings Cooper attends throughout the month are at night because many volunteers have full-time jobs.
Trueman says Cooper is always being interrupted, be it a parent calling the help line or someone wanting to loan from the lending library in her office.
But Cooper says she has come to enjoy the distractions. The varied work days make the job, with no benefits and a lower-than-average paycheque, a little easier to handle.
“It’s just more interesting to be involved in so many different things,” she says.
Much like Hopewell, Cooper has her challenges. She works at her computer donning sunglasses because the monitor is too bright for her recently transplanted cornea.
Last March, Cooper was travelling in France when she got a bacterial infection in one of her eyes. She ended up in a French hospital for five days.
Because of the infection, Cooper lost the vision in her right eye, but about eight weeks ago she had a cornea transplant.
The stitches will remain in her eye until February and her vision will only start to improve between six months to a year after the procedure. She was off work for just two weeks.
“You can only kind of stay away for so long,” she says. Besides, there was a fashion show fundraiser that needed attention.
Hopewell’s second annual fashion show raised more than $30,000 — almost one third of their annual budget. Cooper arranged tickets, prepared tax receipts, collected items for the silent auction and wrangled local celebrities to model.
“Those big events take a lot of work,” she said. Eating Disorder Awareness Week, Feb. 5-11, is quickly approaching and meetings to plan next year’s fashion show start that month.
The workload does not deter Cooper. She says a corporate job, where you’re just another employee, is not for her — non-profit is where she belongs.
Cooper plans to stick with Hopewell because her work is not finished, she says.
Her goal is to produce a big enough surplus to cover expenses and hire more people to share the workload.
“I don’t give up that’s for sure,” she says. “You really feel that the work you’re doing is going toward something.”