I Love You To The Bones

I Love You To The Bones

It was hard to say how long it had been going on.

I hadn't realised anything was happening really because his routine had become my routine; I was there at half six making his coffee (black, no sugar) and preparing scrambled eggs that would be shoved into the fridge to heat and eat with cold toast later on. The procedure was never broken and perhaps that was my fault because I insisted I'd follow it with him but it was the same thing over and over. I knew that as soon as I broke that routine he'd so carefully pieced together, he'd be at my neck reminding me he didn't need supervising or to be treated like a child. It was peace of mind for him and I wasn't the one to break that by not having the coffee on the table by the time he sat down.

Gradually, it worsened. Meals were sneaked upstairs to be flushed down the toilet. He went for secret jogs at 4 in the morning, anything to shed the weight he thought he had. I took him to his GP and asked, pleaded them to just check him over and everything I didn't want to happen suddenly came harshly into reality. The doctor was adamant Dougie should have been kept in hospital for a couple of days, just to keep a well-needed eye on things. He refused, his tired eyes wide and panicky, his clammy hands gripping my own. As much as I didn't want to, I pleaded for him to be kept at home because I was perfectly capable to look after him myself; I was given health packs with information on what food to cook and I was given the reminder to 'just be patient' because he'd recognised I was irritated and pack it in altogether.

Dougie fell deeper and deeper into the trap he'd set for himself. Control was predominant in his head; he often planned when I was meant to eat, cooked it and sat down at the table to watch me eat it. Notepads on our shelves were full of recipes cut out from magazines, alphabetically ordered and tucked away in plastic sleeves to keep them clean. Whenever he attempted to go out in public, panic gripped at Dougie and he clung needily to my t-shirts, hiding his face between my arm and chest, determined to make everyone see he was in control. It failed everytime. I told him time and time again that he had nothing to be scared about but he worried about the way people would look at him and the way people talked about him behind their hands. Terror pulsed through his body and after one particularly bad trip to the chippie down the road, Dougie stopped going outside altogether. It was safer inside, he thought, and people couldn't take the mickey out of his lack of control whilst he was sat watching telly.

We'd sat in so many GP waiting rooms that I feared the smell of antiseptic hand wash and old magazines would forever linger on our clothes. Dougie had test after test with every doctor, each of them doing the same thing before sighing and sitting on the edge of their desk, hands clasped on their chest and eyes melancholy. It was the same thing over and over. They all told us how serious the situation was and how weak Dougie was going to be become after another week of so little food but none of them made any true effort to give him another stab at being better. The bruises from needles breaking his delicate skin blossomed almost immediately on his pale skin; the dull purples a harsh and realistic contrast to the almost white of his arms. They lingered for up to a month, a smudge on a blank canvas.

The next step after GP surgeries was a visit to an anorexic unit in the nearest hospital. Consultants asked Dougie questions but it was almost as if he reverted to a child whenever they spoke to him. He hid his face in his hands and picked at his arms with his fingernails. As far as he was concerned, he didn't have a problem and sitting in a hospital room with doctors staring at him for minutes and scribbling something down on their clipboard was a waste of his, and their, time.

He'd said so many times before, particularly when I was concerned about a bruise or the amount of times he'd gone to the toilet. Dougie, as he so eloquently put it, was bloody sick of people wrapping him in cotton wool because there was nothing wrong with him. It was the same thing every single time he got hot-headed; he'd leave the room when I was speaking to him and at the end of everything, he'd end up collapsing almost immediately from exhaustion and all I did was sigh and scoop him into my arms, buckle him into the passenger seat and race as fast as I could to A&E. It was nothing out of the ordinary and people were shocked when I acted so passively when it came to Dougie's knees just buckling from beneath him and I was just used to it. The first time it happened I admittedly thought he was going to die right there and then but when I finally got my head together and dialled for an ambulance, I was reassured that it was just his body crying out for nutrition. We were advised to stock up on vitamins 'just in case' and sent home with a slapped wrist, leaving us back at square one with no means to hop onto square two.

Dougie once asked me whether it'd hurt when he died. I didn't answer. I squeezed his knuckles in response and that was the end of the discussion. He knew that he could talk to me about anything but that I drew the line at because it was just so hard to process. Just the thought of being alone made my heart skip a beat with anxiety and still does to an extent.

An echo began chasing its tail around my head. It muttered that he was going to get better. The little voice was like a lullaby, as I soon grew accustomed to its little whisper. It came when I was pouring the boiling water into his mug of instant coffee and when I was on my hands and knees, cleaning up the vomit that Dougie had thrown across the bathroom in a moment of sheer panic and desperation and I did my best to stay positive with it. At the end of day, I was carrying the weight of a heavy world for both of us and that meant whatever optimism I had leaked into Dougie and gave him just the slightest chance at getting out of bed but negativity occasionally trickled through and sometimes, I just couldn't find the energy to stop it. It was draining on Dougie obviously but the aftermath, the picking up every little broken piece, was just as hard to go through. Another little voice argued with it. "If he's going to get better then why isn't he starting?" it teased in an evil little voice and although it felt horrible, I was inclined to agree that maybe, however hard my poor baby tried he just wasn't going to recover as well as we'd hoped.


It has often crossed my mind how I would have coped if it was someone else. I knew it was going to be an uphill struggle - treatment was a painful inevitability and Dougie was probably always going to have problems with food because it was so instilled into him but however frustrating that may have turned out to be, at least his heart was still beating and blood was still pumping through his body and he'd be alive. Maybe not fully alive alive until his head got around the impact of everything but still functioning. Still breathing. Perhaps with someone else I wouldn't have had to put things on hold as I did with Dougie, but really I wouldn't have changed it for the world. The concept of being best friends before boyfriends was properly put into practice as Dougie recovered because it was clear all adult behaviour was wiped from his mind. He needed to be a child for a while, he needed to be taught things and I was fine with being the person to teach him those things. We had a stable relationship either way really and that was vital to my wellbeing as well as Dougie's.

When Dougie was discharged from the hospital, he suddenly appeared to be very grateful. His head had finally recognised that something was drastically wrong with his body and that was the first massive step towards being healthy and being healthily in control just as Dougie wanted beforehand. He seemed to be savouring every minute and that was good. It meant progress was being made; the cogs in his head were beginning to creak back into motion and when I said something that made him smile it was a proper smile, the kind that crinkled his eyes. It sounds silly on paper but as we drove home, I felt this massive surge of pride for the man (and for the first time since the beginning of our friendship, I felt inclined to call him a man and not snigger afterwards) sitting next to me, staring at the McDonalds and bus stops we passed in complete awe. Everything was new to him; brand new smells invaded his nose, new sounds passed through his ears and a new feeling of being alive was taking over his body. He wasn't dancing on the edge anymore, it wasn't dangerous for him to be anymore.

It was a week before I took him out. It was only the local Starbucks, where we both had a bottle of water, but it was still a packed café and that was better than nothing. Admittedly, he panicked a couple of times and went to desperately bury his face in my t-shirt but when he realised that everyone was too wrapped up in their own thing to spare a glance at him or what he looked like, Dougie’s jitters disappeared. He did well to spend half an hour in there but after a while, he began chewing his nails and staring at the people in the queue. We had some tears when we got in the car but I felt a certain kind of pride because I knew that four months ago Dougie would’ve never been able to sit in a café like that. The next step after that was a muffin or a coffee and a restaurant after that – we had to take baby steps until he was completely used to it.

So a relapse and a couple more trips to A&E later and here we are today. There are some things that Dougie can’t quite handle yet, like eating a full meal in public and paying for things himself, but we’re making steady progress. I say we’re like it’s both of us that has had an eating disorder but the way I see it, we’ve done it together. It’s not often we talk about what the unit was like but we’ll occasionally sit down with a hot chocolate and some biscuits to just talk. I know it’s hard for him, and it’ll probably be hard for him for years to come, but my mother always taught me that not talking about what has harmed you will harm you even more. She also taught me that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and I’d like to think that’s what’s happened with Dougie. He’s matured and grown into something I’m rather envious of.

I know this will sound like the ultimate cliché ending to end the ultimate cliché story but I hope he knows that, if he wants to travel to the end of the world and back or go entirely loopy, I’m there all the way with him because that is what best friends do.