Fragile

by Nikki Grahame

  I felt so lucky. I had my very own doll to play with.

  It was about half an hour later that Alison, a ward sister, came into the cubicle and saw me dancing my doll up and down the bedcovers.

  ‘You’re not allowed that,’ she said, before walking over and snatching it from my hand. ‘It’s got to go.’

  Hot tears swelled in my eyes as Alison stomped out of my cubicle, Barbie’s glossy blonde hair bouncing on her shoulders as she disappeared from sight in the sister’s hand. ‘I hate you,’ I gulped as she pulled the curtains shut behind her. And at that moment I did.

  I was getting harder, tougher. They were treating me like a prisoner and I was starting to act like one.

  I counted the hours until visits from Mum and Dad. They were the only thing that broke the boredom. I didn’t normally have much to say when they were there but it felt good being near real people again.

  Mum would come to see me every day. I used to look out of my bedroom window and wait for her Morris Minor to pull into the car park. Just seeing the familiar curve of its bonnet and knowing Mum was nearby made me feel better. But as soon as her allotted visiting time was up, that was it and she was sent packing again.

  It was a very tough time for Natalie. That was when she learned to cook – and look after herself. Mum was so caught up in trying to get me better that it was hard for her to look out for Natalie too. Even now I think Nat hurts a lot when she remembers how she would have to walk home from school and cook her own dinner if Tony wasn’t around. Then she’d spend the evening tidying the house and watching telly on her own until Mum got back from visiting me. She was trying so hard to be the perfect child, to make everyone else feel better in this awful situation – it was only later when her anger and resentment for all that came pouring out.

  Dad used to visit too. Once he smuggled me in copies of the Beano and Dandy, which I’d loved reading at home. I lifted my blankets over the bed-table to create a den, then sat underneath reading the comics with a torch.

  Yeah, I’ve fooled them. They won’t know what I’m doing, I thought. But it was only a couple of nights before I was spotted, the comics were confiscated and Dad was banned from visiting me for the rest of my stay at Hillingdon.

  They were incredibly strict there and Mum and Dad had to agree to their rules. In any case they were terrified that if they brought me home I would die.

  The nurses were very tough on me too. One day I asked one of the agency nurses if I could have a bath. I knew I was chancing my arm but I was desperate. She let me walk all the way down the corridor on my own, which was a treat enough. Then, in the bathroom, I soaked for 20 minutes, feeling my weightless body resting effortlessly in the water.

  But when Sister Alison came round and discovered what the agency nurse had done, she went mad. I never saw that nurse again and think she might have been sacked.

  If I needed the toilet I had to ring a buzzer and a nurse would appear and snap at me, ‘What do you want?’ Five minutes later a bedpan might be brought.

  One afternoon a nurse called Heather had gone off to get me a bedpan but after ten minutes she still hadn’t reappeared. I was desperate for a wee and after another five minutes I couldn’t hold it any longer. I picked up the bowl used for my bedbath every morning, squatted down and weed into it.

  Sure enough, Heather chose that exact moment to walk back in. My cubicle was opposite the nurses’ station and as she opened the curtains all the other ward staff could see me. They were giggling and nudging each other as I squatted there in full view. I felt so humiliated that I crawled on to my bed and cried.

  Some people may find it difficult to believe that nurses could be unkind in the ways that I have described but I don’t think they were nasty – they just didn’t have any time for me. I was on a medical ward alongside kids with ‘real illnesses’ and they must have thought I was a self-indulgent little madam taking up a valuable bed. That’s certainly how I felt they thought.

  There was a boy in the cubicle opposite me with leukaemia and they must have made comparisons between us. He used to wave at me when he went past the window of my cubicle and apparently he wanted to come in and visit me but he wasn’t allowed as it wasn’t on my privileges list. Instead he made me a card and one of the nurses delivered it.

  In the first few weeks I spent a lot of time crying for Mum, Dad and Natalie. But I’d already survived the Maudsley and I was getting tougher all the time.

  Natalie wrote me a letter once and was telling me that she was totally in love with Marti Pellow, the lead singer of Wet Wet Wet. She copied out all the lyrics to their song ‘Goodnight Girl’. It was in the charts at the time.

  The night after I received Nat’s letter I woke in the early hours and could hear the song playing quietly on the radio in the nurses’ station. I lay there and thought about my love and promises – for Mum, for Natalie, for Dad.

  Then I rang my buzzer. When the nurse came, looking tired and a bit tetchy, I said, ‘I want to get well – can you bring me a glass of milk, please?’

  She returned with a large glass of milk and I drank the whole lot down in one go. It must have been a month since I’d drunk milk like that and it tasted good.

  It was an amazing moment. That could have been my happy ending and this book would be over here. But it wasn’t to be that simple. Next morning when I woke all I felt was guilt and self-loathing at having drunk the milk. It was clear to me I didn’t want to get better that much.

  I went back to refusing food, and spent more days and weeks watching time pass by outside my cubicle window. My weight had gone up a bit after I arrived at Hillingdon but once I felt they were trying to push it up too far I just refused more and more food.

  I didn’t hit a couple of stages on my chart, so – as threatened – out came their nasal tube. As soon as I saw a nurse carrying the long, white tube towards me one afternoon, I felt physically sick. At the side of my bed she coated the end of it in gloopy KY Jelly and then began to insert it into my nostril. The pain was acute.

  ‘Keep swallowing, Nikki,’ the nurse said as she thrust the tube further and further down. But I could feel it coming out through my mouth and I was gagging. There were huge globules of KY stuck at the back of my throat and I was crying, begging her to stop.

  When she finally realised she couldn’t get the tube any further down my throat, she whipped it back out, making me gag and choke. It was a size-10 tube – one of the large adult ones – so I begged them, if they had to do it, to use something smaller. In the end they agreed to one of the feeding tubes they use for babies.

  When the nurse tried to insert that one it was only slightly less painful and I still cried as I felt it slip down into my stomach. Once it was inside me, the nurse then attached the tube to a bag of milk feed connected to a pump which began flooding the liquid into me. I pulled a hand mirror out of a drawer, opened my mouth and watched as the milky feed slipped down into my body. There was nothing I could do to stop it. I’d lost control and I was devastated.

  I did soon start to do something, though. The next time they tried to tube-feed me, I started writhing around the bed, pushing the nurses away and clamping my hand over my nose. For 20 minutes I screamed and shouted, adamant I would not let them get the better of me again by tube-feeding me. Fighting made me feel good, as though I still had some control over my life, like I was still alive. But what happened next was to change all that.

  I’d been lashing around so much on the bed, I hadn’t seen another nurse enter the cubicle with a huge hypodermic needle in her hand. It was only when her hand was by my thigh and jabbing the point towards me that I had any clue what was happening.

  ‘This will just help you sleep,’ the nurse said as she broke the surface of my skin with the needle.

  Maybe I should have screamed out in protest at this, the first of literally hundreds of times I would be beaten into chemical unconsciousness over the next few years. Maybe I should have fought harder at being treated like a tr
oublesome zoo animal. Maybe I should have screamed as my last ounce of fight was being drugged out of me. But in reality all I thought was, Oh my God, I wonder how many calories are in that?

  The sedative was of a thick, syrupy consistency. That has sooo got sugar in it, I thought, before I slumped backwards against my pillows, unable to care any more.

  Clearly I’d become too big a problem for them. Pacifying me or negotiating with me had become too much bother, so they went for the easy option – a quick jab in the leg and a perfectly docile patient.

  It was like something out of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest – I was being drugged into submission. But for them it worked and meant they could at least get a nasal tube in quickly while I was out for the count.

  I still ripped out a couple more nasal tubes during my time at Hillingdon but, by using sedatives and tube feeds, within three weeks they had lifted my weight out of the danger level. Even so, with it still hovering around 21 kilos (3 stone 4 lb), they realised the Hillingdon regime just wasn’t working for me. They needed somewhere that could help me get to the root problem of my anorexia and try to bring an end to it. It was felt a medical ward wasn’t the best place for that.

  And so, at the beginning of April, I was transferred to a psychiatric unit for young people. My weight was still desperately low and getting better was a very long way away.

  CHAPTER 8

  COLLINGHAM GARDENS

  ‘Celery? Yuk. Not even an anorexic who knows celery contains no calories at all likes celery!’

  I turned my nose up in disgust at the first meal laid out in front of me at my new ‘home’. Then, when no one was looking, I lifted my T-shirt with one hand and with the other hand slipped the celery beneath the waistband of my jeans and into my knickers. Done in a flash and no one had spotted a thing. This place was going to be a walk in the park.

  It was 7 April 1992 and I’d been transferred straight from Hillingdon to Collingham Gardens Child and Family Centre, a psychiatric unit for children. Again, at that time I was the only kid there with an eating disorder, but at least they had the specialist expertise that might help me.

  And, as I soon learned, they were wise to anorexics’ food-dodging tricks. It was only half an hour after that first celery salad and my new key nurse, Erla, said I could go and play in the cosy room with some of the other young patients.

  We were rolling over the sofas when I suddenly felt the stick of celery slide down my trouser leg and out on to the carpet. I kicked it behind the sofa and wandered off to the other side of the room as casually as I could. But Erla wasn’t daft and within minutes she had found the offending item and knew exactly who was to blame. She pulled me to one side and knelt down, staring me straight in the eye. ‘While you are here, young lady, you do not hide food. If you hide any item of food whatsoever your entire meal will be replaced and you’ll have to start it all over again.’

  I was terrified, both of Erla, a big, imposing woman who seemed to growl rather than speak, and the prospect of double portions for misbehaviour.

  Until that point my first impressions of Collingham had been good. It was housed in one of those huge mansions that line the back streets of Earl’s Court, west London.

  One of the care assistants from Hillingdon, a lady called Pat, had taken me for a day visit before I was admitted properly. The other kids in there mainly had behavioural problems or learning disabilities. Some had been in care, others had been abused by their parents. But even though we’d all been through some really bad stuff in our lives, we still managed to have a good laugh together. We all kind of picked up why each of us was there without ever really discussing it, and we just got on with kids’ stuff instead.

  Everyone seemed a bit more normal than at the Maudsley. What a relief that was! Also, the Maudsley was a secure unit whereas at Collingham we weren’t locked in and that gave it a far more casual atmosphere.

  There were some really cool boys there too. I was a couple of weeks off my tenth birthday when I arrived and just beginning to realise boys could be nice to hang around with. There was Simon, who had been abused by his dad, and David, who had been thrown out of school for getting into trouble, and Mikey, who had behavioural problems. But none of that mattered. To me they were just fun and a bit cheeky and I could be a total tomboy hanging around with them.

  At first I even quite liked the regime at Collingham. They started off by giving me meals like salad with a bit of bread and butter and I felt OK about that. They’d make up the calories with FortéCal, a glucose drink which contained 450 calories in each 200-millilitre bottle. But I was OK with that as I knew exactly what FortéCal contained – it didn’t feel like anyone was trying to trick me into having more calories than I wanted.

  I stopped having tantrums and became a lot calmer. I was happier because I felt I had some control again over what was going inside me.

  But things went a bit wrong the day Mum and Natalie made their first visit to see me there. I had been in only a week and was having my lunch. They’d given me just a salad and everything was fine. But when the nurse brought over a Complan high-calorie build-up drink to go with it, I went potty.

  ‘You’ve filled this mug up too far,’ I screamed. ‘Are you trying to con me? I’m not drinking it,’ I yelled. ‘You might as well take it away.’

  I was still sitting there 40 minutes later when Mum and Nat arrived at the door of the unit. I heard a nurse saying to them, ‘We’re very sorry, Mrs Grahame, but I’m afraid Nikki has refused to eat her lunch, which means she won’t be able to have any visitors this afternoon.’

  A raging anger which had been lying inside me for months suddenly burst to the surface and I became like a demon. I screamed and swore at the nurses, waving my arms around like an out-of-control windmill. ‘I hate you!’ I shouted. ‘You’re all horrid. You won’t let me see my mum. I hate you.’

  One of the nurses walked slowly towards me, making soothing noises and holding her hands out, but I wasn’t having any of it. I lashed out at her, kicking her shins and flailing my arms about.

  I ran towards the stairs to try to get down to where Mum and Nat would be. But by now I was out of control and on reaching the top of the stairs I flung myself forwards, down the steep staircase. I don’t know if I even thought about what I was doing – I just wanted my mum and I needed someone, anyone, to listen to me. I hurtled downwards until I rolled to a stop halfway down the steps, crying and shaking in a pathetic heap.

  The nurses ran down to pick me up but I still wouldn’t let them near me. I hate you!’ I kept screaming. ‘I need my mum.’

  I smashed my head against the banister and pulled at my clothes and hair with my hands in a frenzy of screaming and sobbing. It took nearly a quarter of an hour for me to calm down enough for the nurses to be able to help me up the stairs and back to my cubicle.

  Things were only going to get worse at Collingham, though. To begin with they must just have been getting me used to eating again because after the first fortnight the salads stopped and they started giving me the same food as all the other kids – and that was terrible.

  Chips were on the menu twice a day. Now, I can understand why they did it. They were catering for children and their thinking was ‘kids love chips’. Except me of course. I was the only one on the ward with an eating disorder and being given chips was about the worst thing I thought possible.

  As soon as I smelt the deep-fat fryer warming up in the kitchen my stomach would turn in revulsion. Normally the chips were slapped on the plate with burgers or fish fingers or, when Erla was in charge, Cornish pasty! All that pastry as well as chips. It was foul.

  My stance hardened. Now my day fell into a routine of meals that I would eat and those I would refuse. I would always eat breakfast because it was always the same, a bowl of cereal, a piece of toast and cup of tea. It was safe for me – no surprises.

  After breakfast I had to have half an hour’s bed rest. Like at Hillingdon, the staff knew I would take any opportun
ity to exercise, even if it meant just stepping on the spot in the corner of a room. And bed rest was the only way they could stop that.

  Afterwards, I’d have time for a quick play with the other kids before snack time at 10.30. But I’d never eat that snack, which meant I’d have to sit there with it in front of me until lunchtime at 12.15, when they’d take it away. It was all part of a carefully worked-out plan. I’d realised that if I ate that snack – usually a Complan drink and a couple of biscuits – I’d then have to have another half an hour’s bed rest, before just 45 minutes’ play, then lunch. For the sake of that 45-minute play, it was not worth drinking a 450-calorie Complan drink. I might as well sit it out until lunchtime.

  I rarely ate lunch either – again, it just wasn’t worth it to me because lunch finished at one o’clock, followed by an hour of bed rest, then an hour of play before the afternoon snack at three. I wouldn’t eat a full lunch in return for just one hour’s play in the afternoon. No way.

  I saw the afternoon snack differently. It was normally only a Complan build-up drink and a biscuit, followed by half an hour’s bed rest, then two hours’ play before supper. Two hours running around made eating the snack worthwhile. I’d use that two hours to stomp up and down the corridors or run around the garden, anything to burn up some calories. That playtime also provided some mental stimulation after having spent most of the day sitting at a table staring at food I was never going to eat.

  By the evening meal I was usually back to not eating again. Dinner finished at quarter to seven, bed rest for an hour took it to quarter to eight and then bedtime was half past eight. Again, it just wasn’t worth it to me and I might as well just sit in front of my untouched meal until bedtime.

  I sat at my meal table for hours on end, bored out of my nut. Occasionally some of the nurses would try to encourage me to eat but most of them just ignored me – that’s what they had been told to do as I wasn’t supposed to get any interaction or attention until my plate had been cleared.