Free Losing It by Sandy McKay

Packed it all down my neck. And once I started I couldn’t stop. It was like I’d found this hole and I was plugging it up with food.
    When I finished I felt sick and full and disgusting – like a big fat pig. And I had to go lie down on the bed because I felt so revolting and then I thought ‘if only I could get rid of it’. And that’s when I made myself sick. That’s the firsttime I ever put my fingers down my throat… The first time ever…
    Must write to Issy again soon.
    D,
    God, I hate hospitals!
    The smell of disinfectant – everything all stiff and starchy. It’s like being cut off from the world, because when you look out the window people are just going about their business without you. And you think, how dare they? How dare they carry on like that without you? It’s like no one even knows you’re up there – all flattened into nothing, with starched sheets and nurses and doctors telling you what to do all day. I feel like taking one of those stupid sheets and writing ‘Help!’ in big fat letters with orange lipstick or tomato sauce or something and dangling it out the window. Except that there are all these humungously high hedges everywhere so probably no one would even notice. Maybe that’s why they grew the hedges in the first place. Maybe there have been escape missions in the past with patients abseiling to freedom on knotted hospital sheets…
    Nah!
    It was scary when Mum went into hospital. At first Dad said it was going to be for just the one night. Only it wasn’t because she stayed for weeks. Aunty Kay wasn’t married then so she came to help look after us.
    I remember going to visit Mum with Dad and Aunty Kay. She was propped up in bed with pillows – a red cardy draped around her shoulders, her hair sticking out funny and no lipstick on. Slow motion Mum with this weird slurry voice and dead-bird eyes.
     
    Two days later:
    Francine has got worse. I don’t know the details but apparently her family are at her bedside, so it must be serious.
    Poor things. It must be hard when there’s nothing you can do to help. When all you can do is stand and watch.
    Like with Mum. God, I hated it. All those creepy corridors and the nurses making silly jokes and talking to her like she was some little kid. ‘How are we today, Mrs Morrison? We won’t get big and strong if we don’t eat our breakfast, will we now?’
    The meals came on a trolley. Dry knobs of food plonked on thick white plates. How could she eat that muck? We’re not allowed meals on trolleys in this hospital because we have to eat in the dining room with knives and forks and nurses watching on like hawks. Not much fun for them either, I don’t suppose. (Watching Kara eat is excruciating. She cuts every piece of food into a zillion tiny mouthfuls, stacking it all into little piles.) The rest of us aren’t much better, chewing the meat until it turns to dust in our mouths. In this place you can’t leave the table until thirty minutes after you eat. That’s the rule.
    At Mum’s hospital I pressed the wrong button in the lift once and we ended up on this floor that was like a museum with glass cases full of old surgical instruments and stuff. They looked more like tools for fixing cars to me. I used to have nightmares about those instruments.
    Mum had electric shock treatment. Bzzzzz … Bzzzz …
    I wasn’t supposed to know that but Aunty Kay let it slip one day when we were having a milkshake at the hospital café. Electric shocks
were going to make her better, she said. Electric shocks? How bizarre. I used to imagine the doctors forcing her fingers into the electric plug and her hair standing on end like in the cartoons.
    When Mum came home from hospital she was a different person. She didn’t lie about in bed all day any more but she was like a robot. Dad said it was the drugs and just ‘give it a couple of months and she’ll be right as rain’. But she looked so vacant, like no one was home. Even her hair looked weird