Fragile Read online

  I would like to dedicate this book to my mum, dad and sister, for dragging them to hell and back.

  I would also like to thank all of the doctors and carers who looked after me: Brian Lask, Dee Dawson, Paul Byrne and Sam Swinglehurst.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 Fun, Food and Family

  Chapter 2 Things Fall Apart

  Chapter 3 A Big, Fat Lump

  Chapter 4 Never Give In

  Chapter 5 The Maudsley

  Chapter 6 I Don’t Belong Here

  Chapter 7 Hillingdon Hospital

  Chapter 8 Collingham Gardens

  Chapter 9 Too Uncool for School

  Chapter 10 Raw Anger

  Chapter 11 Death Pact

  Chapter 12 Zombie Child

  Chapter 13 Get On and Die

  Chapter 14 Sedgemoor

  Chapter 15 Huntercombe

  Chapter 16 I’ll Never Have to Eat Again

  Chapter 17 Rhodes Farm

  Chapter 18 I Want to Live

  Chapter 19 A New Struggle

  Chapter 20 Never Going Back

  Chapter 21 Big Brother

  Chapter 22 The Magic and the Misery

  Chapter 23 A Life Worth Living

  Epilogue

  Further reading and resources

  Plates

  About the Author

  Copyright

  In order to protect their identities, many names of patients in the hospitals and institutions have been changed.

  FOREWORD

  This new edition of Nikki Grahame’s book is an update on what’s been happening following the release of Dying to be Thin in 2009. Nikki has achieved unimaginable success since her last hospital admission at the age of 19; she has proved to herself that life can be wonderful and there is good to be found in this world. After so many years of misery and battles with herself and every single person who tried to help her, countless doctors and health professionals, her family and school friends, finally she has made a place for herself and glimpsed happiness. She has also become an aunty to my lovely little boy, Sunny Wren.

  And for a while Nikki seemed to overcome the illness that has owned her and monopolised our family life for so long but something I have learnt – in the seemingly endless years that she has battled anorexia – is that it never really goes away. Not completely. Especially not when the illness takes over a person, as it did my sister. It is always with her, like her shadow, a closest friend and at the same time, a most hated enemy. And time again that shadow has cast its darkness over her. Once again, with an outpatient’s admission to an eating disorders unit, she must find the strength to fight, literally for her life. And whilst it is no doubt hardest of all for Nikki herself, it is utterly heartbreaking for us, her family.

  Nikki is the strongest person I have ever known, so brave and determined, but she is still my little baby sister and fragile in my eyes. My instinct to protect her is as strong as ever. I know that my nagging her to put on weight, cut down on exercise and take better care of herself must be tedious and I’m frequently told exactly what to do with that advice. Anorexics often need to feel a sense of control, with their desire for control being projected onto their relationship with food. Through my family’s experience with Nikki’s illness we have seen that our best intentions to help her have sometimes had the opposite effect: leading to her fighting us harder, and the anorexia becoming stronger. Trying to give Nikki the space and understanding she needs whilst attempting to manage our own fears for her has proved to be a challenging balancing act!

  The years of illness have taken their toll on our relationship. At too young an age, sisterly mischief and fun was pushed aside for envy and resentment. Nikki was jealous of my freedom; that I was at home, at school, out with friends, amongst the living and not the dying. In turn I resented her for taking my parents away from me (I would spend days on end alone in the house whilst Mum was at the hospital tending to Nik). With the development of her illness, it felt as if the world forgot about me. Of course, I felt guilty for being free and healthy and whilst frantically worried about her, I was also envious of the attention she was getting. I was desperately concerned about my mum, who was helpless in the face of Nikki’s determination to starve to death, too. These confusing and negative feelings made me so angry with my sister.

  Our relationship is still troubled; perhaps it always will be. I hope that in time my son will bring us closer together – Nikki is a wonderful aunty. Due to the damage caused by her illness she is unable to conceive naturally, a consequence not often considered by anorexics whilst caught up in the condition. Being Sunny’s aunty may well be the closest she ever comes to motherhood. Sometimes I am overwhelmed with sadness at the harm and suffering this illness has caused my sister and our family.

  There were many contributing factors to Nikki’s recent struggles. The experience of writing the first edition of this book was extremely painful for her and during that process she was reacquainted with various bad habits and unhealthy rituals that have always been so hard for her to let go of. Life in the public eye has also proved to be quite stressful – whilst she thrives in front of a camera, the uncertainty of a career in show business can be very unsettling. Combined with the fickle and loud voice of the media in this country, it’s really no surprise that someone as vulnerable as Nikki has succumbed to such a serious relapse.

  For a long time I believed she was finally OK, although I would still have the occasional nightmare about crumbling bones and feeding tubes, which after 20 years of trauma seems fairly natural! But over the last couple of years she has slipped further and further from us and the sad reality is that we could lose her. I hope there has been some catharsis for Nikki in the writing of this second edition. We have always known that before she can begin to receive help, she must first admit to herself that there is a problem, which she has done in the following pages. I am so proud of her for this and for everything else she has achieved in life.

  Nikki is a patron of the National Osteoporosis Society and an ambassador for Body Gossip, and hopes to raise awareness of anorexia and other eating disorders through this book.

  Natalie Grahame, May 2012

  PROLOGUE

  I was clutching the gleaming metal award so tightly in my hands that my knuckles had turned white.

  In front of me, around each of the six golden tiers of the Royal Albert Hall, were more than five thousand people, clapping, cheering and even screaming my name.

  Through the bright lights I could see Simon Cowell, David Walliams and Billie Piper, all applauding … me!

  It was the most amazing moment of my life.

  I’d just been presented with the award for Most Popular TV Contender 2006 at the National Television Awards for my time in the Big Brother house earlier that year.

  My mum and I had spent hours searching for the perfect dress for that night and here I was in a £275 Betsey Johnson bluey-green silk gown and a pair of £375 Gina shoes. It was the most I’d ever spent on an outfit and I had never, ever felt so special.

  I’d been dropped off at the Royal Albert Hall in a limousine and as I walked down the red carpet, hundreds of people stood 20 deep at either side, calling my name and elbowing one another out of the way to ask me to sign autographs. Beyond them was a bank of paparazzi photographers taking my photograph from every angle.

  For anyone, that night would have been special. But for me it was miraculous. Because for so long no one had even imagined I would still be alive then, let alone receiving a coveted television award.

  I had been just eight years old when I began a determined and resolute campaign to starve myself to the brink of death. O
r beyond that if need be, as I wasn’t much bothered if I lived or died.

  At that time, the late 1980s, I was one of the youngest people in Britain to have ever been diagnosed with anorexia nervosa – a psychiatric illness which makes people, usually teenagers, desperate to become as thin as possible and develop an obsessive fear of gaining any weight at all.

  For the best part of the next decade I stumbled around a miserable circuit of hospitals, specialist units, my own home and foster care, as doctor after doctor tried and failed to make me eat.

  My childhood was shattered and I grew up in institutions surrounded by kids with the most horrific mental problems. At night there was no one to kiss my head as I curled up in my hospital bed. In the morning there was no one to cuddle me when I woke up sleepy and scared.

  I became brutalised, like a wild child who had lost touch with normal behaviour. I’d scream and scratch and yell and fight when people tried to make me eat.

  A perfectionist from the start, I was determined not just to be anorexic. I wanted to be the best anorexic Britain had ever known. Many of my doctors think I achieved that. They stuck tubes up my nose, stitched tubes into my stomach and pumped me so full of drugs to control me that I became like a zombie. But still I wouldn’t willingly give in to their demands that I should eat.

  Once I lay in a hospital bed just 15 minutes from death as my mum begged me to cling on to life. Twice I took overdoses in a bid to end my misery. The first time I was just 13 years old.

  But gradually, miraculously, I discovered that there could be a special life for me outside of hospitals and institutions if I chose to live it.

  This is the story of that choice, and it is the choice I hope and pray other kids with anorexia will one day find the strength to take.

  CHAPTER 1

  FUN, FOOD AND FAMILY

  Looking back to the house at 37 Stanley Road before everything went wrong, it always seems to have been summer. Back then everything was good, better than good. I had one of those childhoods you normally only see in cereal adverts.

  We didn’t have bags of money or live in a huge mansion, but we had fun. There were summer holidays to Greece, Mum and Dad would cuddle up on the sofa to watch a video on a Saturday night, I had a grandad I adored who had an endless supply of corny jokes, and sometimes my older sister/occasional friend/usually arch enemy Natalie even let me play with her collection of scented erasers!

  There was Mum and Dad and Natalie and me (and Rex, our dog). And it worked. My mum, Sue, was tall and slim. She was shy compared with other kids’ mums but she doted on me and Nat. She worked as a dinner lady but was always home in time to cook our tea – and she was an amazing cook. Nothing fancy, but proper home cooking that we all sat around the table to eat. Every night it was something different – spaghetti Bolognese, lasagne or a macaroni cheese that was worth running the full length of Stanley Road for.

  Then there was my dad, Dave. And while of course I loved Mum, with Dad it was something more – I adored him.

  Mum always laughs that the love affair between me – Nicola Rachel-Beth – and Dad started within minutes of my arrival at Northwood Park Hospital on 28 April 1982. After Natalie, Dad had been hoping for a boy but when I burst into the world screaming my lungs out he was, for some reason, totally smitten. From that point onwards I was the apple of his eye.

  After the birth, the nurses wheeled Mum away to stitch her up. She left Dad sitting in a corner of the room by a window, holding this little bundle with jet-black, sticky-up hair and chubby cheeks.

  When Mum was brought back an hour later, the sun had gone down and the room was pitch-black but Dad hadn’t even got up to switch the light on. He was still sitting in exactly the same position, transfixed by the new arrival – me.

  As I got older the bond only grew stronger. But it was kind of OK because there was an unspoken agreement in our house – Mum had Natalie and Dad had me.

  I couldn’t leave Dad alone. And for him little ‘Nikmala’ was pure delight.

  By the time I was four or five, every time Dad left the house to go to work or pop down the pub I’d go belting down the road after him, begging to be allowed to stay with him.

  I’d spend hours standing outside the betting shop at the corner of our street after Dad disappeared inside, rolled-up racing pages clenched in his hand as if armed ready for battle. Kids weren’t allowed in and the windows were all covered over, but whenever the door was pushed ajar I’d sneak a glimpse of that mysterious male world of jittery TV screens, unfathomable numbers and solitary gamblers, all engulfed in thick cigarette smoke.

  It became a standing joke in our family that whenever Dad emerged from the bookies’ with a brisk, ‘Right, off home now, Nikmala,’ I’d reply, ‘Can’t you take me to another betting shop, Dad? Please?’

  By the age of five I’d started going running with Dad. He loved keeping fit and so did I.

  Dad worked shifts at a big bank in London, looking after its computer system. It meant he wasn’t around a lot of the time but the moment he stepped inside the door I was all over him.

  Everyone wanted to be around Dad, to laugh at his jokes and hear his stories. Well, at the time I thought it was everyone, but looking back I think it was probably just women. In fact even at seven I knew that Dad was a bit of a ladies’ man. He couldn’t take us for a plate of chips at the Wimpy without chatting up the girl behind the counter.

  You name her, Dad would try to turn on the charm for her – my nursery school teacher, the lifeguards when he took me swimming on a Sunday morning, holiday reps; pretty much anyone really. But at that point it just seemed harmless, a bit of a fun. I had no idea what was really going on in my parents’ marriage and how it would soon tear our family apart.

  We also spent a lot of time with my Grandad, my mum’s dad. He always had a pipe sticking out of the corner of his mouth and Natalie and I called him ‘Popeye’. He had just one tooth in his bottom gum which he’d wiggle at me, ignoring my squeals, as I sat on his lap, cosy in the folds of his woolly cardigan.

  Up until I was seven everything was fun. With just two years separating us, Natalie and I were constant playmates. Then, as now, our relationship veered between soul mates one day and sworn enemies the next, but hey, at least things were never boring.

  We were always very competitive with each other. Natalie was a jealous toddler the day I first appeared home from hospital in the back of the family Morris Minor. And we still fight over Mum’s attention now. Mum always went out of her way to treat us fairly and make sure we both felt included in everything. But it was never enough to stop the bickering. If I even thought about touching one of Natalie’s favourite Barbie dolls, she’d go mad. But I was just as protective over my toys.

  When I was five or six I would pore over the family photo albums and jealously interrogate Mum about any pictures I didn’t appear in.

  ‘Why are you cuddling Natalie in this picture and I’m not there?’ I’d demand. ‘You weren’t born then, Nikki,’ Mum would explain.

  In another picture from that old album Dad is pushing me in the buggy while Mum holds Nat’s hand. ‘But why weren’t you pushing me that day, Mum?’ I said. Even though I had Dad’s total devotion, I wanted Mum’s too. And if that meant trampling all over Natalie to get it, so be it.

  My competitive nature and quick temper had probably been bubbling under since birth. I cried pretty much continuously for the first fortnight after I was born, which should have given Mum a bit of a clue what she was in for.

  And as a toddler I was pretty tough. Certainly any three-year-old who ever went for a spin in my favourite bubble car at the Early Learning Centre in Watford never made that mistake twice. Mum found me pulling one kid out of the car by his jumper before leaping in and driving off round the shop myself.

  At play school I had to stand in the toilet on my own one morning for putting a wooden brick on one of the other kids’ heads. Another time I was hauled up for kicking one of the boys.

&nbs
p; At infant and then junior school I was always up to something, getting into scrapes. Dad called me his ‘little bruiser’ but I knew he was proud of me for sticking up for myself. But I was popular in class too – I had a big group of friends and I was always the leader.

  I was in the Brownies, went to the church’s holiday club, loved swimming at weekends and was always out playing on my bike after school with kids from our street. My friends Zanep and Julidah from down the road were always round our house and we’d play for hours in the twin room I shared with Natalie.

  Our house was a fairly typical chalet bungalow in the north-western suburbs of London, with two bedrooms overlooking the street at the front and above these a big attic which we used as a playroom. Our garden was magical. Back then it seemed huge to me, with its long slope of grass stretching from a wooden-boarded summerhouse all the way down to the living room window. To one side of the garden was a ‘secret’ passageway which got narrower and narrower until it reached the special spot Natalie and I used for burying treasure – well, Mum’s old jewellery from the 1970s. In another corner there were swings, a slide and a climbing tree.

  On the patio at the top of the garden, we would help Dad light bonfires in the winter and in summer we would stage our theatrical productions there, prancing and dancing up and down.

  Sometimes I think that house in Stanley Road will haunt me for the rest of my life – I was so happy there and I was a kid there. Because what I didn’t know then was that the time spent living in that house up until I was seven was my childhood – all of it.

  The only thing that made it OK to be called inside from that magical garden was the thought of one of Mum’s dinners. Up until the age of seven I would eat pretty much anything she put in front of me. I was never one of those ‘just three chips and half an organic sausage’ type of kids.