A young woman who suffered from anorexia from a young age turned her life around to follow her dream of becoming a nurse after the treatment she received in hospital changed her perspective on life.
Paige Rivers, 23, from Worcestershire was first diagnosed with anorexia at the age of 10. From the age of 13 to 19 she spent a maximum of six weeks out of hospital but has ‘pulled through’ and is now training to be a nurse at Edge Hill University.
The doctors believed Paige’s eating disorder began from her childhood trauma. At first Paige explained how naïve she was as she didn’t know what an eating disorder was.
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Paige told the ECHO: “When I was 13, I was first hospitalised and this is when it got much more severe. I never seemed to get better, I just seemed to get worse and relapse more quickly when I came out of hospital.
“I completed my GCSE’s in hospital, I taught myself everything.” But when Paige was 17, she began with mental health problems due to her low weight and the fact she had been tube fed for a long time which had ‘caused a lot of issues’.
Nearly two years later, just before Paige was 19, she got sent across the country to a hospital in Manchester and relapsed “hard and fast and ended up in ICU with first stage kidney failure and was very, very unwell.” She explained: “I pulled through. I’m not sure how but I pulled through and then ended up in a specialist hospital in London where I spent the next two years.
“In that admission, I addressed my trauma which was a long time coming. The trauma only ended at that admission so there were disclosures and addressing that long life of complex trauma which is the thing that got me through at that point.”
After completing her A-levels in hospital, Paige decided to apply to study medicine at university and secured her place on a medicine course. But, after her time spent in Intensive Care Unit (ICU) “being that physically unwell and having the nurses save my life, that’s when I was like ‘I want to do that.”
Paige said: “I know what it’s like to be nursed and I wanted to nurse. It was the little things like the nurses brushing my hair or doing very simple things that made the difference to me.
“It‘s about the difference I knew I could make being a nurse myself. I knew at this point I needed to get myself together and I left hospital in June 2022 and ended up at university in September 2022 so it worked and I’m doing really well.”
Paige spoke about her favourite thing about nursing as she told the ECHO: “What you do as a nurse really changes a patient's outlook or even just their day and that's the most valuable thing to me that you don't have to be brilliant at everything to make a big difference as a nurse.”
In both 2020 and 2021 while she was in hospital, Paige wrote two books - ‘Inside my head’ and ‘Trauma, My therapist And I’. Paige explained: “Inside my head is essentially about being inside the head of someone with anorexia and it's about understanding that no eating disorders are the same.
"I think the one underlying message for the book is that you will never fully understand someone's eating disorder even if you have an eating disorder because they're so individualised. It's more about how to help someone knowing that you’ll never fully get what they’re going through.”
When Paige disclosed her trauma with her therapist, she recommended that she began writing again as she knew it helped Paige. A year and a half later in 2021, her second book ‘Trauma, My therapist And I’ which explores therapeutic relationships, was printed and published.
On the blurb it reads: “Follow me on my journey from disclosure to living again.”
Paige will be graduating from Edge Hill University in 2025 and plans to stay in the area. She said: “I really like the north, I'm very content here. I love the Trust where I've completed my placement so yeah, I think I’m a northern girl now.”
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You can still apply to study nursing at a range of universities through UCAS clearing.
Search ‘NHS Nursing Careers’ to find out more.
