My Speech to the parliament, YEAR 2013.

I never thought that the day I was admitted to the pediatric ward No 412 , Spring 2010 was the beginning of a nightmare that still affects me. (Not anymore but when I wrote this text.)

Before everything happened I was a very ordinary eighth grader who trained football 4 times a week plus games. Many of the team started eating vegetarian food, so I wanted to try it too. However, I just left out the red meat and started eating more salad. It happened in autumn 2009.

On the autumn holiday in the swimming pool with the family my mother didn’t notice anything special with my body. I was just like before .. as a kid I had always been tall and thin .. but in December when I tried Christmas party clothes in Zara’s changing room, mom saw how malnourished I looked and then I understood myself that something was wrong.
After Christmas we went to a private doctor who sent us immediately to the hospital, Tyks . I was on the ward for a week and after they saw that I ate , they gave me permission to go back home and start home care..
I could start going to the school sonly when my weight had increased from 40kg to 45kg . Home care was arranged so that I went once a week (sometimes two ) to the school nurse to be considered and to the health center for talking about 20 minutes.
Mom could work at home, so we started to eat high energy food and I didnt get to move myself anywhere outside the house , sometimes I could stand outside for 5 minutes.

After three months, the weight had not gone up as I expected , sometimes 200g and sometimes 100g . My anxiety got worse and I never met my friends because I thought they would be disgusted at how I looked. I sat at the computer and I was very lonely . Of course , I had my family, but it was not the same. A teacher helped me to do school at home so that I could handle my school year.

In April the nurse rang to my mother and said that she had called the hospital because my weight went up so slowly. Before that, my mother had read a lot about anorexia and thought that OK, maybe I have anorexia though I ate all the food and didnt purge.. As she tried to get help from Helsinki and Kokkola eating disorder center , but they had no vacancies for me.
It was May Day when I was put in Tyks and there began my hell . Against me was a doctor who said how horrible I looked , a clear anorexic , I already knew that I wasnt pretty to look at ..

The reception was quite different than it was three months ago , I was like a second class citizen . I was scared and did not know what happened and why everyone blamed me . At that time , I spoke very bad Finnish and it made my fear even worse because I did not understand half of what they were talking about.
Swedish -speaking doctors were not available , except for one , but she was never in place ..
Before this I had never been away from home , only occasionally at some football camps . I was the youngest child in the family, and used to always have the family with me so it was pretty hard for me to suddenly be left like that. Did not understand at all what was going on, I had never wanted to end up in this situation. There were all sorts of tests and samples on me , no signs of vomiting or other physical activity .

The youth psychiatry came from the psychiatric department and wanted to meet me and my parents. She asked my parents if they knew how serious illness anorexia is, my parents secured that they knew about the severity of anorexia is.. And for me she showed no kind of attention just at the time she told me what happens after you stop eating , I gathered courage and told her that I still eat .. and then she looked at me pityingly and said ; Amanda little , you do not understand this because a snake lives inside you, called Anorexia , the best thing you can do is to come immediately to our mental center.

Four long weeks, a month I managed to listen to the doctors that forced me to admit all possible things .. like that i purged.. it would have been easy for them if they had some reason why I didnt gain weight although I ait through their feeding schedule a nutritional therapist had written to me . a doctor had also come in front of me and almost screamed; ADMIT that you vomit up the food!

I was in a panic.

I have always had digestive problems and I have been advised to drink enough water so it eases , but in the department  I did not get to drink water without permission,because they thought that I filled up my weight with water and i didnt dare to ask so I became dangerously dehydrated ..

I was so nervous about everything so sometimes I could pee down my bed and it was terribly embarrassing because I was in a room where there was a boy my age and younger children in the beds beside . I got to do my stuff in a pot next to my bed and it was tabling further fun because people walked past there all the time ..
Daily , my physician came to me and talked about how many potatoes I ate and criticized my appearance in front of my parents and the other patients .Like; Look at that girl.. , she looks like a skeleton , I was just crying .
The nurses were really mean and one said ; hold your window closed so you dont fly out with the wind and that anorexic girls dont feel warm, when I had told her Im sweating .. The only Swedish -speaking nurse , drew me a stair and showed me where I am now and  told me it isnt many stairs down to death , soon you will be up with the dead people in heaven.

The Nutritional therapist did not give a permission for my parents to buy me nutritional drinks from the pharmacy when we suspected that the weight would not gain with this foodplan  . My mom figured out the calorie amount I had received from the hospital and it showed that there were only 1,200 calories a day , and after that she wanted to discuss with nutritional therapist but the answer was that she was the only nutritional therapist they had and she is in a great hurry and her schedule is full, and that she has more important patients like Cancer and transplant patients .

It is obvious that the weight did not go up with that calorie amount..

It was very busy and turmoil in the department and they said they did not have time to watch me all the time, and they told me the children’s intensive care unit was vacancy and I moved over there . There I lay all day,night in bed, couldnt move on my toes because I was stuck in a machine that started to squeak if I moved myself.

Behind the curtains were sometimes dying people who needed immediate help because adult intensive care was full.

It was very quiet so I heard easily what they discussed and accused me of . I heard they said that this was the last stair that the nurse had drawn for me and now the only thing that is left is death. I was never in gavage  because I ate through the food-plan, every day, this is  written in the epicrisis as well .

The worst thing was that they did not listen to either me or my parents. They never took us seriously , and the only thing the doctors did was telling me that I would be immediately sent to the psychiatric ward , and he said it was the only treatment that I needed. The pathologist told me that it is useless to think that we will get support for health care in Sweden , only if we can prove that they have failed in their management.

I felt every day how they tortured and accused me and waited for me to break down .. In the last page of the epicrisis it says that the girl breaks down anytime, she just cries and says nothing.
One evening when I ate supper a doctor came (who had taken care of me in the beginning, that doctor who wanted to send me straight to the psychiatric hospital, and that had come with her face in front of me and demanded that I should admit that I vomit)  She gleefully and told me while I ate supper, that we are sending you anyway to the psychiatric ward. She told me this didnt work properly. I called and told my parents what she had said.

This was the last piece for us. They had not talked about this for my parents so the last confidence disappeared immediately . So me and my mom escaped to Sweden . On Sunday night,  my dad waited in the hospital hallway and called me and said that I should leave everything in the hospital, so i did it and I walked silent and and slowly out the door. Our car is was waiting outside. My mom was in the neighbor car (we borrowed) and a I jumped in the car, switched clothes and then we directly drove to the evening boat that took us to Stockholm. Name and date of birth that was required at check-in we had also borrowed from the neighbor who has a same age girl as me. My dad rang simultaneously to the hospital and told that we took Amanda to Sweden for private care and that she is in safe hands.

In the morning when we drove out of the ship , the whole harbor was full of POLICE OFFICERS AND DOGS .
Mom thought that now they’re taking us, but we did it through and probably they were looking for someone other than us .. The situation was really paniced.Mum could not believe that this was reality, here we go maybe with the cops after us , Escaping from Finland .

We werent really wrong..  In Finland the same morning five police officers and an ambulance standed outside our house and had come to pick me up. Dad was in the shop so my sister was all alone at home and they were going to take her with them . They did not believe her when she told she was not Amanda . The neighbor came and helped and proved that it is the wrong girl that you are about to take.
But our adventure had not even started in Sweden , Mom had an old friend in Stockholm which received us luckily , kindly  and immediately. After that we went to the tax authorities to make a change of address, we had to stay with her the first few weeks before we found our own apartment.

Then it was just googling eating disorder clinics, we found several plsvrd but we chose MANDO CLINIC .

Without calling in advance or something, we went there and asked to talk to them and luckily we got it arranged immediately .

We told them my story and they asked my a lot of things and decided that I will get past the waiting list because I have such a good motivation to get well . But first we must acquire Swedish social security number and address must be in the Stockholm area .
At the same time , we looked at the site and the other patients who were there and their treatment . Likewise examined physician me and took blood samples.
The first time in half a year It felt like my mother dropped a huge weight from her shoulders, she felt that they knew what they were doing, and they had an warm and cheerful welcome, a pleasant doctor and the atmosphere there made her feeling that she could leav me there with good sense and safety and that life will alright.
The Child protection authority called and asked us to mention when I got in, so they can stop the monitoring .
Two weeks went by before we got my social security number, and it was two long weeks , we were afraid that something would go wrong and we would not get protection issue and that the police would find us . We drove around the Stockholm archipelago and landscape and hired a small apartment in Stockholm , I really missed home but finally we got am significator that I was let into the Mando Clinic.

Day care in the department , they have 19 locations and it can be combined so that the family can sleep in your own room in another department as there are bathrooms, they share a kitchen and dining room with the other patients’ family members.

I did not get that chance because I didnt refund the hospital .
Immediately after the first week of treatment my weight  gained 750g and after it, it went up all the time! I was in Mando  for 2-3 months and I got home in August to begin 9th grade in my school . I went for a check in Stockholm only once a week , then 2 times a month and then once a month . Weight havent a single time since then gone down.
High school(10th grade) I started in 2011 , but was canceled in the middle, since I started having panic attacks so school didnt work out for me. A Swedish psychologist was not found, so we started driving to Helsinki once a week, but the trip was long and expensive and difficult so we decided to start a Finnish anyway. (It did not much help, I never felt like I was understood but I thought it was the best for me. Today I survived this all by myself and with support from my family, after a long time over depression.)

I wish no one never ever need to go this route through to become healthy. I also wish that everyone has a right to decent a treatment in their own language if they end up in hospital for any reason whatsoever.

 I was just a very scared 13 year old girl.