Post by Chimera on Apr 18, 2021 17:50:45 GMT
Relatively short excerpt (the article is mainly about an unusual physical illness):
Finally, after years of being disbelieved and misdiagnosed, someone was investigating her problems properly.
[…]
When she was 15 Loretta had anorexia, though she says it lasted for less than a year. Throughout her teens she also complained of digestive problems, which would flare up from time to time. But for most of this period she still managed to happily cook and eat, with Julie playing sous chef whenever Loretta couldn't manage alone.
[…]
At 19 she went from just about managing, to becoming bed-bound by pain.
"Things went downhill dramatically - I couldn't eat or go to the toilet at all, and then the next five years became a nightmare I couldn't wake up from," she says.
This nightmare began with a doctor who was convinced that Loretta's rapid weight loss could only have been caused by the return of her anorexia.
Mental health services soon got involved and Loretta spent more than two years in eating disorder units. At one point she weighed just four stone.
Forcing herself to eat in order to gain weight seemed to her the only way out of the cycle, even though the pain it inflicted was severe.
Her desperation would sometimes turn to rage and she was sectioned under the Mental Health Act three times, for a total of 18 months to stop her leaving.
"I told them repeatedly that the only reason I am depressed is because of my bowel and stomach difficulties, but they didn't believe me," she says. Delusional psychosis was added to her medical notes.
She attempted suicide several times because of the hopelessness she felt at not having any treatment for her pain.
[…]
All meals had to be finished within a set timeframe. The radio would be turned off when the time was up, and Loretta would be left staring at the food left on her plate. Tinned fruit and yoghurt or boiled vegetables with processed meat.
Nobody else was allowed to leave the table until she had finished, and she says staff and patients would heckle and bully her to hurry up.
After every meal patients spent an hour being watched closely in the communal living room to make sure they didn't try to get rid of the food they'd just eaten.
Most days Loretta would just curl up in a ball on a chair, trying to alleviate the pain she was in. Others read, did colouring or watched the television. One woman, who Loretta says had been in and out of these units for 13 years, would scream and scream but nobody was allowed to leave the room to escape it.
Loretta often felt like screaming herself, especially when she was under section and a member of staff would be sitting within touching distance of her throughout the entire night and day for weeks.
"I craved peace and quiet from it all," she says.
"I fully recovered from anorexia, it was a life lesson which became a life sentence."
Years later Loretta's reaction to the roast potatoes would help lead to a diagnosis of hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS), a genetic illness that can manifest itself in lots of different ways.
What the test showed was that Loretta's stomach is partially paralysed and cannot empty itself properly. Confining her to a secure unit and forcing her to eat had been pointless.
Incidentally, later in the article, there occurs one of those infuriatingly idiotic cirumlocutions I've complained about before. I've indicated it using bold type:
Almost all of her happy memories of food feature her sister, Abbie.
Abbie was so struck by her big sister's traumatising experience in eating disorder units that she chose to work in a mental health hospital for children.