Читать книгу Fragile - The true story of my lifelong battle with anorexia - Nikki Grahame - Страница 7

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. Or 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.