Seconds to Snap

by Tina McGuff

  It was an unexpected thought and, for a moment, I wavered. These people were sick enough without me adding to their suffering. How would she cope? What if my suicide prompted another? And what about my family? I couldn’t bear to think how distraught they would be when they got the call later to tell them their daughter, granddaughter, big sister was dead. Tina bled to death in a toilet – that’s what they would have to tell them. How would my little sisters cope with that? A memory, a vision they would carry with them for the rest of their lives, that she killed herself in a dingy hospital toilet.

  I can’t go through with it. I realised this in an instant – then, in a fit of anger, I sliced straight into my inner arm. The razor sunk easily into my skin and along, about three inches. The skin widened very quickly as the blade was so sharp but I felt no pain – it was like a hot knife in butter. Blood came immediately and I felt very sick – the adrenalin and shock took over and I realised I needed help before I passed out. Already my head was swimming as I felt my hand on the door handle and ran out of the toilet towards the nurses’ station. Then I passed out.

  When I came to I was on my bed with a big bandage on my arm and the curtains closed around me. Sister Cummings stood by my bedside.

  ‘How long have I been asleep?’ I asked.

  ‘An hour – we gave you an injection to keep you calm,’ she said.

  I was filled with shame, deep shame for what I’d done. ‘Please don’t tell my parents or sisters,’ I begged.

  ‘Of course I won’t, Tina. I will leave that one to you to explain as I’m sure they will want to know why there is a huge bandage on your arm.’

  She looked at me then, with real sympathy in her blue eyes, and left me alone, closing the curtain behind her. I closed my eyes again and fell back to sleep.

  A few hours later, Sister was by my bedside once again to tell me the doctor was on her way. Now nervousness took hold – how could I explain to her what I did? I didn’t even understand it myself.

  When Dr Ballinger appeared, she was her usual calm, quiet self. She looked at me with concern but I could hardly meet her eyes, I was so ashamed.

  ‘Hello, Tina,’ she said, settling herself into a chair next to my bed. ‘How are you feeling?’ And she touched my arm with the bandage on it, just very lightly.

  The tears sprung immediately to my eyes and I looked down.

  ‘Terrible,’ I replied. ‘I don’t know what happened. I wanted to kill myself, Doctor. I wanted to cut my throat but I couldn’t do it – I couldn’t put my family through that. I know I’m putting on weight and to everyone else it looks like I’m getting better, but I don’t feel any better inside; I feel worse. Worse and worse and worse! I just don’t see what my future looks like – I can’t imagine it at all. What the hell is wrong with me? Why can’t I just be happy and normal again?’

  Dr Ballinger listened carefully and when she spoke it was like balm to my troubled soul.

  ‘Tina, you are normal,’ she assured me. ‘Your behaviour today was uncharacteristic of you and it will probably never happen again. This is just a tiny setback and nothing to worry about. You will be happy again with our help. You must trust us to get you there. One day, Tina, you will look back and be surprised that you had this awful illness. I promise you that.’

  Setback. I let that word roll around in my head that night. It was a funny word and one used a lot in my time on the ward. Every time I failed to hit my target weight for that week or my mood sunk and I stopped eating, it was described as a setback and I was told not to worry. We were encouraged to look forward, not back – anything that was back was not welcome.

  That night, I made a conscious effort to trust the doctors and nurses to help me. Dr Ballinger told me I had a future and so I chose to believe her. I wanted to get better – I didn’t want to live with anorexia for ever. Now I knew I couldn’t kill myself either, I had no choice – I had to trust them to help me recover.

  Chapter 14

  Breakthrough

  One afternoon, I walked into the smoking room and saw a slim woman with curly, shoulder-length hair in a smart skirt and blouse, perfectly made up. She looked around forty and I assumed she was a new member of staff – there was something swift, efficient and thoughtful about her movements. Her manner was focused and assured, not like many of the patients.

  After she stubbed out her cigarette, she said: ‘I’m away for a chat with the nurse.’

  ‘Oh, I thought you were a nurse!’ I replied, surprised.

  ‘As if!’ She laughed, then walked off. The next day, I saw her again – looking every bit as immaculate as the day before. She smiled when she recognised me and introduced herself as Lorraine.

  Then she asked me why I was in there.

  ‘Guess!’ I said, never imagining for a moment she could tell just by looking at me what was wrong.

  ‘Anorexia!’ she responded without hesitation, and I had to laugh at myself then for thinking it wasn’t obvious.

  ‘I’ve never been in a place like this before,’ Lorraine confided, looking a little scared.

  ‘I’ve been in and out of here a long time now,’ I admitted. ‘It’s like my second home. It’s nothing to worry about. You will be better soon, I’m sure. The staff here are amazing! Why are you here, Lorraine?’

  ‘It’s very strange,’ she began. ‘I had my own business, a catering supplies firm, and it was going great. I’d never run a business before and I thought I’d do my own books for VAT and tax and stuff. Well, after two years, the stress of it all was getting to me and I didn’t really know if I was doing it right but, because it was my business, I just had to get on with it.

  ‘One day, out of the blue, I got a visit from the VAT inspector and they went through everything with a fine-toothed comb. After three days of this, I felt like a criminal and incompetent at everything I had worked so hard to achieve. But I carried on. The problem was my confidence was shattered and I questioned everything I was doing. Now I was struggling to grasp the very basics of the work and my mental health began to suffer. I couldn’t sleep; I was stressed and upset all the time. I knew I was in a bad place but I didn’t realise what was happening until it was too late.’

  I nodded as I listened silently. I recognised this thought – so many of us had lost control of our minds without ever knowing it.

  Lorraine took a long, thoughtful drag on her cigarette. Then she looked up to the ceiling and blew the smoke upwards, shaking her head as she recalled what happened next.

  ‘A few weeks after the tax inspector’s visit, I was walking in town and suddenly a massive black shape appeared in front of me on the pavement and it started swallowing people. I screamed and froze on the spot. A passer-by called 999 and soon a doctor and an ambulance and police arrived. They told me later I had developed psychosis due to the stress and anxiety of the business. I had to give up the business and now I’m on the mend but that was the scariest moment of my life. It was so real to me, Tina, that black thing. And I find it sad that it got to that point before I got help.’

  I felt for Lorraine then – she had tried so hard and obviously pushed herself to a point where her mind snapped. It was an eye-opener and showed me once again how easy it is for the human mind to turn on itself.

  As the months passed, I made lots of friends on the ward – people with schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorders – those suffering all manner of different illnesses. Often I would lie in my bed at night and imagine living inside their heads. It seemed a very scary place to me, probably much darker than I thought mine was. But to them, mine was off-limits, too, for none of them could relate to me, or why I was starving myself to death. Even though I was very ill, I was not scared of my illness as I thought I was always in control and understood my limitations. But you never knew what was going on in other people’s heads.

  One day, a new lady arrived in the bed next to mine. In her late twenties, she was quite large and short; she had long, straggly brown hair and
scars on her cheeks and forehead from cuts, as well as on her arms and legs. They were the worst self-harming scars I had ever seen in my life. Her forearms were criss-crossed with massive amounts of scar tissue, scar upon scar. They were blue and deep red as well. There were fresh cuts, too, and a lot of dried blood on her chest above her T-shirt.

  On the first day, this woman didn’t speak to anybody. This was perfectly normal – a lot of people arrived on the ward in a very distressed state and it took them time to settle in. But on day two, she caught my eye while I was listening to a cassette on my Walkman and nodded for me to come and talk to her. She introduced herself as Linda and, as she did so, my eyes flicked down to the terrible cuts and scars on her arms. When I met her eye again, I could tell she’d seen me staring.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I blundered, embarrassed to be caught in this way.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I know it’s horrible but it’s my only way of dealing with it, you see.’

  ‘Dealing with what?’

  ‘I was raped as a young girl.’

  Linda went on to describe in stark, brutal terms how she had been raped. Though I was aware of course that people did horrible things, I had never come across anyone who had been abused in this way before, or at least, not one who wore their scars so openly. Linda’s story was shocking and distressing. In the ward, we all had our crosses to bear and this was the place to bear them publicly. If there was anywhere in the world to be open and honest, it was in here. She opened my eyes to a horror I had never thought about before and I was very sad for her – it made my life look easy in comparison.

  ‘I cut myself because it helps me to get rid of the pain,’ she explained. ‘The more I bleed, the more the pain comes out.’

  As the days passed, I noticed Linda was becoming increasingly unhappy and aggressive in the ward, getting angry and shouting at the nurses. She was cutting herself a lot and always had fresh blood somewhere. During those moments, I would just leave the area – it was quite common for people to have small confrontations every now and again. Besides our problems, each of us could get a little stir crazy sometimes.

  But a few days later, I was in the TV room and the next thing all hell broke loose. The sirens started blaring as the emergency panic-alarm button had been pressed. Everyone ran to the top of the ward. I didn’t really want to run as I could see the commotion was focused in my bay and I dreaded to look.

  Now I heard screams: ‘Oh, shit! Oh, Linda, Linda!’

  Eventually, I got to my bay, from where I saw the most terrible sight I’d ever seen. Linda was standing there, strangling herself with one of my cassette tapes, which she’d unravelled. No longer a healthy pink colour, she was now grey-blue. A second later, she fell to the ground, and all the nurses ran to her and shoved us back towards the TV room. It was terrifying. I curled up in a ball in the TV room, trying to push those images out of my head. At that moment, I started to cry – I just wanted my mum to take me home; I didn’t want to be in a place like this any more.

  The screams went on a bit longer and then, silence. After an hour, I returned to my bed and Linda was gone, along with everything from her space, including her bed and cabinet. My cassettes too were nowhere to be seen, confiscated by the nurses.

  The next day, Sister Cummings told me Linda had been taken to Carstairs, the psychiatric prison, for her own and our safety. At this, I burst out crying and Sister knew exactly why – seeing Linda trying to kill herself like that had been very upsetting.

  ‘Don’t worry, Tina, everything will be okay,’ she said. ‘Linda will be fine.’

  But I never found out if Linda was fine. I wondered if a person like her could ever be fine and that made me disgusted with the person who raped her. He had destroyed her life for ever and, even if she managed to get better, she would always carry those terrible scars with her, the physical embodiment of the torture within her soul. We are all such fragile beings, and this person had harmed Linda, probably beyond repair.

  But I understood one thing: Linda wasn’t trying to hurt or upset any of us – she was only trying to block out the pain that she felt, day in and day out. I understood that perfectly.

  It was a constant struggle now to keep the depression at bay. Two months after the incident with the razor, my weight dipped again to 5 stone. I just couldn’t face food and starving myself was the one thing that seemed to make me happy. Although I drank the Build Ups, I refused to eat. In truth, I was scared of getting better, of facing the reality of life, of growing up. I was confined to bed once again and visits from my family were cut off. They called the ward regularly to see how I was doing but were not allowed in to see me. And now the black thoughts returned.

  You can’t do anything right, Tina. You can’t even kill yourself properly. You’re worthless, a failure and weak! It’s time to get the job done now – you’ve wasted everyone’s time and now the best thing to do is just finish it.

  I had a plan. Before I was confined to bed, I’d noticed that there was a window on the concourse of the seventh floor with no lock on it (they must have missed it as every other one on every level had full locks). So my plan was to jump. It had been an option in my head for a while and, in some ways, it felt like a little fantasy – this was my get-out plan in case the therapy and counselling failed. Well, it felt like the right time to put it into action. The hours and hours of counselling and therapy hadn’t worked – here I was, three years on, still miserable and starving.

  I had it all planned. That night, I lay in bed, feeling strangely disembodied. I knew my life would end within hours, I just had to find the right moment to escape. Now I was very calm. As I lay waiting, I began to wonder how it was going to feel, flying … As a child I used to imagine, if I was a bird and could fly, what would it feel like? Now I was going to find out and in a weird way the thought made me happy.

  I waited until the night staff came on and I saw it was my favourite two nurses. Sister Mary was an older lady, Italian Roman Catholic. She was small, round and loved her job. Every night, she came round to talk to all of us and ask how we were. Never in a hurry when it came to her patients, she genuinely cared about people. I loved it when she was on as she felt like a granny; she would hug me and made me feel loved. She also used to carry little religious cards with either the Virgin Mary or Jesus on the cross on them. She showed them to us and told us we were all loved by Jesus.

  Alan, by contrast, was the funny one. He’d bring the Horlicks and coffee to the TV room at night and sit and chat with us all or, if we were bed-bound, he would bring the trolley around the bays. Usually very relaxed, he always had funny anecdotes up his sleeve, which made me laugh – a rare thing on that ward! He treated me like a real person and not just an ‘anorexic’; he really lightened the mood. I noticed that people usually behaved better when there was laughter.

  That night, just before lights out, Mary came and spoke to me in my bed. She asked how I was doing and listened patiently when I said I’d had a fairly boring day but I was okay, not too bad. I didn’t let on just how low I felt.

  She showed me a little card with Jesus on the cross, and said: ‘God bless you, my child.’ Then she kissed my cheek. It broke my heart – this tender, simple act from a beautiful person. I struggled to contain my emotions but, after she left, I started to cry and pulled the cover up over my head so nobody would see. To me, this was the sign that I needed to leave this world. Even though I had no energy and was confined to bed, I now had validation that it was my time to go: the most amazing woman had blessed me. I actually felt like she loved me in some way and she made me feel loved.

  Because I knew the pattern of what they did each night, I knew I would not be watched for a few minutes while they locked up the medicine cabinet and turned the lights off. So I waited and, as soon as they left, I dragged my bony frame out of the bed. Instantly, I felt propelled by a huge volt of energy. I ran out of the ward in just my bare feet and nightie, raced up the stairs as fast as I could, my feet slapping
the hard, cold floor. My legs and feet ached as there was no muscle there at all and my knees could barely bend. Still, I sprinted up three flights of stairs and then I could see the window across the concourse. My goal was in sight!

  Come on, come on!

  I urged my body onwards as I knew it was only a matter of seconds now. My heart was pounding; I was nearly free. Then, just feet away from the window, I heard Alan’s voice shout: ‘TINA, PLEASE STOP!’

  I whipped around and they were all running after me: Alan, Mary and two other male nurses. Now I knew I had to get there before they caught up with me and so I tried even harder to run the last few feet even faster – I had to get out of the window and I was not going to fail.

  ‘STOP, TINA!’ came their yells. Sister Mary was screaming and screaming. But I just ignored them. Seconds felt like hours as they gained on me. Just as I was about to reach out and touch the handle on the window, I felt the impact of another body on my left side and the momentum slammed us both into the ground with a sickening thud. The pain in my bones hitting the hard floor was excruciating. And the realisation that I had once more failed instantly brought the tears.

  It was Alan – he had jumped on me to save me from throwing myself out of the window. I could hardly breathe as I had run so fast and now they surrounded me, all panting hard from running. Sister Mary was very upset.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I wept. ‘I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to upset you all.’

  Alan was hugging me now as I cried and cried. The rest of them looked dumbstruck as they realised just how close I had come to actually jumping out of the window. The two male nurses put their hands to their foreheads, pushing back their hair and puffing out their cheeks with relief. It had been a close call for all of them, too close.