She Paid for the Needle Herself

The timer on her phone was still going when she pulled the needle out. Five milligrams of tirzepatide, the lowest dose. She pressed a cotton swab to her belly and counted to three, the way the video told her to. The foam box sat open on the bathroom counter, ice pack sweating onto the tile. She had paid for it herself.

The endocrinologist had not been unkind. He looked at her numbers, asked about her blood sugar, and told her she did not qualify. BMI 25. No diabetes. No prescription. She went home and typed her measurements into ChatGPT, which gave her a list of tests to run: thyroid, liver, kidneys. She paid for those too. Everything came back normal.

So she ordered the needle herself. That was in March.

The first week, her body ached like the second day of a fever. She stayed in bed. When she stood up too fast, the room went dark at the edges. By the second week, her body seemed to accept it. The ache faded into something smaller: fatigue, a low thrum of dizziness, a bloated feeling if she ate past full.

What surprised her was not the nausea. It was the quiet.

She had spent thirty years with a voice in her head that talked about food. Not a metaphor. A running commentary. The cake in the fridge, the chips on the table, the dessert shop an hour away that she once drove to alone on a Tuesday because she could not stop thinking about it. When she watched mukbangs during her dieting years, she would lie in bed and cry from wanting.

Now the commentary stopped. She watched the same videos and could not picture the food in her mouth. The texture was gone. There was nothing there.

On Reddit, people call it food noise. She had never heard the term before the shot. Now it was the only way she could describe what had happened to her. She also stopped drinking, without deciding to. A friend handed her a glass at dinner. She shook her head. She was not being polite. She did not want it.

Her weight was 62 kilograms. It is still roughly that, minus ten. She is 30. She wears a smaller underwear size than she did at 17.

In the spring, she went abroad with friends. She had been looking forward to the food for months. The restaurant was hard to book. The plates came out one after another, and she ate two bites of each. Everything tasted like the inside of a freezer.

Her friend asked if she was okay.

Xiao Yu said she was full.

She did not tell them about the needle. She could not explain the feeling that came with the compliments. When someone said she looked thinner, she smiled and dug her thumbnail into her palm under the table. It was the feeling of having copied someone's answers on a test and still coming in first.

After three months, the muscle she had spent two years building in the gym was a third gone. She squatted one afternoon and saw stars. Her right ear felt blocked for days. She typed the symptoms into an AI and got a name for it: patulous Eustachian tube. She read the page twice and closed the tab.

She had started the drug because she wanted to be thinner. She had not expected it to feel like this. Calm, mostly. Empty in places she had not known were loud.

Lana started later and stopped sooner. She weighed 65 kilograms. She has lost 15.

She tried semaglutide first. The sight of the needle made her queasy, and the side effects were worse. She switched to tirzepatide. The first shot felt like a hand around her throat. She tried to eat a bowl of noodles and got two bites in before her body refused. The food sat there. She pushed the bowl away.

She kept the before-and-after photos on her phone. She looked at them more than she meant to. In the old ones, she is turning away from the camera. In the new ones, she is not.

She stopped the drug months ago. She lifts now, heavy weights, trying to hold on to what she can. She has thought about going back on it. She has also spent a lot of time reporting the dealers who leave phone numbers in the comments of weight-loss posts, the ones selling cheap vials to girls who weigh 80 jin and have never had a blood test.

She is careful when she talks about it. She had a reason. High blood lipids, insulin resistance, PCOS. Her doctor signed off. She does not think most of the girls she sees online have any of that. She thinks they have the same thing she used to have, which is a mirror and a number and a very long history of hating both.

Her rule is simple. The drug breaks a plateau. It does not change your life. If you go back to eating the way you ate before, the weight comes back. She has watched it happen to people. There is no shortcut. There is only a temporary quiet, and then the noise again.

The noise comes back. That is the part people do not talk about as much. A year after stopping semaglutide, most patients in the studies regain about two-thirds of what they lost. On the forums, people write about the tenth day off the drug, when the fridge starts talking again. One woman said the hardest part was not the weight. It was knowing what silence felt like, and having to live without it.

Xiao Yu thinks about the red shoes. The girl puts them on and cannot stop dancing. The day she stops is the day she dies. She has not stopped yet. She does not know when she will.

Her mother still tells her she looks well. Her friends still tell her she looks thin. She has not told any of them how she did it. She is not sure she could explain it if she tried: that she paid for a needle herself because a doctor would not give her one, that she feels calmer than she has in years, and that she also feels like she is getting away with something.

She is not sure which of those things she is supposed to feel ashamed of.

At night, she lies in bed and runs her hand along her ribs. It is a habit now. The phone lights up on the nightstand. A delivery app is offering her a discount on dessert. She looks at it for a second and swipes it away.

Somewhere across the city, Lana is in the gym, pulling a barbell off the floor. Her phone is propped against her water bottle. A dealer has left a comment under a stranger's post: a phone number and a promise. She finishes the set, picks up the phone, and reports it.

The needle goes into the sharps box. The lid clicks shut.