Pulse(19)

‘No. I’m not. But I haven’t eaten much today.’

In fact, I hadn’t had as much as a cup of tea in the preceding twenty hours.

‘Tut-tut,’ Derek said. ‘You should know better than that.’

I did know better than that. I also knew that I was starving myself and that I desperately needed to consume more food, but it was as if I needed to get to the bottom of what was happening to me before I could start eating again. Not that I even knew where the bottom was, or whether I would realise it when I got there.

Grant urged me to eat all the time. Indeed, he begged me to.

But it wasn’t as simple as just doing it.

There was a voice inside me that wouldn’t allow it.

And I was terrified that, once I started eating, I wouldn’t be able to stop and I would grow fatter and fatter until I became a completely round blob like Violet Beauregarde in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Or perhaps, by continuing not to eat, I felt that I was still in some sort of control of what was happening to me. By selecting where and when I swallowed even the smallest amount of sustenance, was I trying to convince myself that I remained on top of my emotions and in charge of my life?

Maybe I even believed it.

However, my psychiatrist was alarmed that what had been an initial show of self-discipline and control had developed into a full-blown eating disorder.

‘Don’t be silly,’ I’d told him with a nervous laugh. ‘Surely anorexia is for teenage girls.’

But the doctor in me knew that wasn’t true. Loads of middle-aged women suffered from anorexia, and specialist eating-disorder wards in psychiatric hospitals were full of them.

But I was surely far from being one of those.

I was fat.

You only had to look at me to see that. So what that Grant said I was just skin and bone, I saw myself as fat and ugly.

‘Three-point-one,’ Derek said, reading from the blood-glucose monitor. ‘Far too low. No wonder you’re feeling faint and having palpitations.’

He dug around in one of the ambulance’s many lockers and produced a high-energy banana milkshake, chock-a-block with added sugar.

‘Here,’ he said, tearing off the top of the carton and holding it out to me, ‘drink this.’

I pushed it away.

‘Come on, Dr Rankin, please drink it,’ he said. ‘Your blood-sugar figure is dangerously low.’

I took the carton and put it to my lips but there was no way I was going to tip it. I tried but I couldn’t. The voice inside my head was now shouting, ordering me not to, and it was simply too strong to overcome.

‘If you won’t drink it, I’ll have to put you on an IV glucose drip,’ Derek warned, almost aggressively. ‘Do you really want that?’

Not particularly, I thought, but, even so, there was no way I was going to swallow his sickly-sweet banana concoction. It would have made me retch.

Derek was still encouraging me to consume his poison when we arrived at the hospital but, far from that being the end of my troubles, it was only the beginning.

Things at that point descended from being bad to worse, much worse.

Maybe it was just fellow-professional courtesy, but I was taken straight through without waiting into Resus, that part of the emergency department where serious trauma and other life-threatening conditions were treated.

It was my customary place of work and I was among my usual colleagues; however, far from feeling relaxed in familiar surroundings, I was self-conscious, ashamed and humiliated.

A senior staff nurse, the very individual I suspected of making the formal complaint against me, was now the person wiring ECG electrodes on my chest to the monitoring equipment. She did it without saying anything and with minimal eye contact. Maybe she was embarrassed too.

One of the other nurses took my right index finger and pricked it with a needle to get the drop of blood required for another blood-sugar test.

Then I was left alone in the cubicle lying on the hospital trolley, with the blue privacy curtains drawn around me.

The time seemed to drag but it must have been only a few minutes before Jeremy Cook appeared, sticking his head through a gap in the curtains.

‘Hello, Chris.’ He said it almost with a sigh. ‘How can I help?’

‘You can’t,’ I said, swinging my legs over the side of the trolley. ‘I’m grateful for your concern, Jeremy, but I really don’t need your help. I’ve no idea why I was brought here. I was a bit dizzy, that’s all. I just needed a little sit-down.’

He definitely sighed this time. ‘Your blood sugar.’

‘What about it?’ I asked.

‘It’s dangerously low.’

‘That’s simply because I didn’t have breakfast and ran out of time for lunch,’ I said in my best ‘don’t make a fuss’ voice. I even forced a laugh. ‘I’m sure it’ll be back to normal this evening after my first glass of red wine.’

He sighed again and shook his head.

‘Don’t lie to me, Chris,’ Jeremy said. ‘We’ve known each other for too long.’ He paused. ‘I’ve just been speaking to Grant.’

‘Oh,’ I said, understanding the significance. ‘Is he here?’

‘No, I called him at work. He’s on his way over here now. You stay right where you are until he arrives. In the meantime, I’m going to give you an injection of glucagon.’