Rathbone Hospital…been a fantastic resource
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Summary: Rathbone Hospital...been a fantastic resource
I developed anorexia nervosa when I was 17, in 2012, just as I was about to go to university, as is common with many sufferers. The nurse at my GP surgery later told my mum that she had suspected something was wrong when I went for my pill check up, months before I was formally diagnosed, but if that’s true, she hadn’t acted on it. I imagine she felt awkward about it.
I went to university and my weight plummeted. I fell through the cracks because I was living half at home in Liverpool and half at university in Cambridge, and NHS services aren’t designed to cope with people moving around. But of course, students have to move around. So when I went home in the holidays I would have to re-register with my GP, for example, and there would be a delay, and my weight was at such a critical point that this was a real problem.
I had an appointment at Rathbone Hospital which i waited about six months for. The clinician I saw weighed me and realised my BMI was so low, she wanted to admit me to in patients straight away. But then whoever was in charge of inpatients said no, since I’d had no treatment, I should try outpatients first. So I went back to university to be treated at **** as an outpatient. This was a huge mistake, because it meant I continued to fall through the cracks, and **** and my Cambridge GP just kept telling me to go home. They would weigh me and tell me I was going to die, but they never actually gave me any help to make me want to live.
In the end, I went home for five weeks for weekly therapy sessions at Rathbone, and I recovered enough to do my third term at university, and from there I was in and out of different services until 2023. I really regret not just being an inpatient, solving the problem properly, and then continuing with my life, instead of being left to struggle on my own, trying to study and work on top of living with and battling this horrible illness every day.
I’ve since been diagnosed with autism and I also think that this should have been assessed years ago, as it would have had implications for my healthcare and possibly helped me a lot sooner. All services were focused on my eating and my weight, they didn’t consider that there might be other issues or traumas at play causing the eating disorder.
Rathbone Hospital itself has been a fantastic resource for me and I’m very grateful to live in a city where I can access this specialist service. I particularly benefited from working with a dietician from 2022-23. It’s weird that none of my treatment before that had involved a dietician but I’m glad I saw one in the end.
Healthwatch Sefton has made changes to protect the anonymity of the author