Brave Girl Eating by Harriet Brown Page A

it’s Dr. Beth I call in a panic. As the nurses wheel Kitty’s bed to the ICU, I trot along beside them, arguing. Isn’t this a bit extreme? Aren’t we overreacting just a little? Can’t we give her more time? She’s a reasonable girl. She’s going to come around, I know it. The ICU is for people who are really, really sick, isn’t it? My daughter’s not that sick.
    But of course, she is.
    Jamie arrives in time to hear the doctor in charge of the ICU tell the nurse, “Get an NG tube.”
    â€œA what ?” I say.
    The doc looks up, his eyes impatient. “A feeding tube,” he says, drawing the word out as if he thinks I can’t hear him. And maybe I can’t. “It goes up her nose and into her stomach,” he adds briskly. “We’ll feed her that way if she won’t eat.”
    â€œNo, Mommy!” cries Kitty from the bed. “Not the tube! I want to be able to taste my food!”
    It is a moment of the highest imaginable absurdity. I want to say, “But you’re not eating anything now!” Later, I understand her reaction. The need to eat is hardwired into our brains and bodies. Anorexia can keep a person from eating, but it can’t turn aside that primal force. Hunger denied expresses itself in other ways—in Kitty’s case, in the compulsion to taste and savor every shred of food she consumed.
    I bargain with the doctor. “Give her an hour,” I beg. “If she eats something in an hour she doesn’t need the tube.”
    The doctor raises an eyebrow. Clearly, he thinks I’m a deluded and interfering mother. Clearly, he doesn’t believe Kitty will eat. But reluctantly he agrees that if she downs a whole protein milk shake in the next thirty minutes, and then eats a plate of spaghetti an hour later, he will hold off on the tube. For tonight.
    The ICU nurse, who is the kindest person I have ever met, brings a chocolate protein milk shake and a straw. She helps Kitty sit up, arranges the pillows behind her, pulls a tray over, and puts the milk shake on it. Kitty reaches for the milk shake, holds it in one hand, lifts the straw to her lips. She’s crying silently now, tears slipping over the sharp cliffs of her cheekbones. Her hands tremble. Her whole body trembles. For five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes she sits, holding the milk shake and crying, while Jamie and I murmur encouragingly.
    I have fed this child from the moment she was born. I have fed her not just with food but with love. The thought of a nurse, even this one, pushing a bolus into her stomach through a tube makes me want to vomit. I try to arrange my face into a neutral expression. I try to be ready for the sight of the rubber tube threaded up my daughter’s nose and down her throat.
    But Kitty eats. One shaky, terrified bite at a time, crying steadily, she consumes the shake. Between bites she talks out loud to herself. She seems beyond caring that we can hear, or maybe she’s so deep in her own nightmare that she doesn’t know we’re here. “Come on, Kitty, you can do it,” she says. “You don’t want to go back to that scary place.” Jamie and I are crying now too, as we understand for the first time exactly how courageous our daughter is. Each time she lifts the spoon to her lips, her whole body shaking, she is jumping out of a plane at thirty thousand feet. Without a parachute.
    Thirty minutes later exactly, Kitty finishes the milk shake. Andan hour later she eats the plate of spaghetti, one agonized bite at a time. The nurses praise her extravagantly, rubbing her hands, her back. It’s more than Kitty’s eaten in days. Afterward she falls asleep. Jamie goes home to collect Emma from the friends who have been taking care of her. I sit in a chair beside Kitty’s bed, exhausted but unable to sleep. Every time I start to nod off, Kitty’s sunken, terrified eyes rise up before me.