Loretta Harms is now 31 years old. For eight of those years she has neither eaten nor drunk.
She was once a perfectly ordinary child: she adored cooking, helped her grandmother and mother bake festive cakes, invented new recipes, and could always come up with something special out of ordinary ingredients she happened to find in the kitchen. By the age of 11 she could already cook better than many adults. So it's no wonder that after school she enrolled in a culinary college: the girl dreamed of the fame of Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsay. But a year into her studies, all her plans collapsed.
Loretta was only 19 when a mysterious illness struck her: from a girl bursting with health she turned into something close to an invalid. She couldn't eat, couldn't use the toilet, and her stomach hurt so badly that she couldn't get out of bed. The doctor she went to decided it was all down to anorexia.
That is how Loretta ended up in a psychiatric clinic — in one, then another, then a third. She was committed to treatment against her will, and in total she spent 18 months in clinics.
«I kept insisting that the cause of my depression was problems with my stomach and intestines, but no one believed me», Loretta recounts.
A diagnosis appeared in her chart: delusional psychosis. No one paid any attention to the pain the girl was experiencing — they considered it mere excuses brought on by a mental disorder. Loretta was forced to eat, after which she would writhe in pain for the rest of the day. And only eight years after the symptoms first appeared were doctors able to give her a diagnosis: hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a genetic disease that had partially paralyzed Loretta's stomach. Keeping her in a locked ward of the psychiatric department and forcing her to eat was not merely useless but tantamount to torture.
Now Loretta is on parenteral nutrition: she is hooked up to an IV drip for 18 hours a day. Through a tube inserted into her chest, into a large vein leading to the heart, her body receives all the nutrients it needs. She carries the heavy bag with her in a backpack — Loretta has already learned to live with this.
«It's hard; I've had sepsis nine times because of a contaminated catheter. But this drip brought me back to life», the young woman says.
She has started cooking again — she has to move around the kitchen in a wheelchair to conserve energy, but it's still a breakthrough. Loretta doesn't taste the food; she relies only on the smell and the appearance of the ingredients. Her roommate does the taste-testing.
«I cook with my eyes, my nose, and my instincts», Loretta smiles.
She admits that she still misses the experiences connected with food: ice cream on the beach, hot chocolate in the cold, baking at Christmas. But she has to make do with the smells. Still, the young woman is happy — simply because she is now free of constant pain.
