Kind of long thread but here we go:
During this #Covid19 #lockdown period, I keep having flashbacks to my early teens, to the eating disorders unit where I spent four months as an inpatient. Then, I was essentially on a personal lockdown, to save myself, from myself.

For the first month, I didn't leave the hospital at all. It was a stuffy place, always kept artificially warm to soothe the inpatients' cold limbs and organs.

In many ways, it looked and felt more like a retirement home than a hospital ward: there were squidgy sofas and green carpet, board games, pine furniture & an odd smell, a combination of mothballs, disinfectant, and hot toast. The inhabitants' bodies were artificially aged, too.

We were a mostly female group of teenagers, and yet we suffered from the same heart complications, hair loss, and frailty of women half a century our senior.

Smells & sounds form most of my memory of the hospital, which was called, perhaps too optimistically, the Phoenix Centre. The tang of macaroni cheese, which I desperately wanted to eat, but which simultaneously revolted me (I ended up scoffing it, sat at 1 of those pine tables.)

Nurses watched over us as we ate our meals & we weren't allowed to leave the table until we'd finished, even if that meant sitting there for one or two hours. Those who refused entirely had a tube stuck up their nose and food pumped into their stomachs directly).

The smell of poster paints from the classroom, where we did art lessons. The smell of blue paper hand towels in the bathroom, where again we were watched over by nurses, in case we tried to sabotage said macaroni cheese eating by vomiting or exercising in the cubicle.

Then, the sounds: "This Love" by Maroon 5 as we ate lunch. The sharp tone of Dr Jaffa - "the big orange" - the loathed consultant doctor, whose job it was to pull us away from our anorexia. Every day at 4pm, he would stride out of his office & fetch a KitKat from the kitchen.

The mellifluous voice of one of the health care assistants, which soothed me as I sobbed at my pitiful and self-pitying situation. It would eventually send me to sleep. To this day, I focus on her dulcet tones if I'm having trouble nodding off.

The sound of wailing and screaming of patients who no longer wanted to be in hospital, or, anywhere, really.

Once the doctors were convinced I really was trying to get better, I was allowed out on short walks around the hospital campus. The other hospital buildings, low-slung & of brown brick, like units in an internment camp, had charming names like "Mulberry" & "Elizabeth House."

Willow trees lounged on the grass and open space. There were too many traffic signs and zebra crossings. But breathing fresh air was a wonderful thing, after the suffocating smells and sounds of the hospital.

That quarantine was much harder, much sadder, than this one. Now, with internet, books, and a quieter, happier mind, this feels almost easy in comparison. I desperately miss my friends and socialising (I will never take Beirut's restaurants and bars for granted ever again).

But I'm also able to see how much happier and healthier I am this time than the last time I was forced to quarantine. Back then, I was reluctantly observing the lockdown in the hospital to save my own life, which it did.

Now I'm doing so, in my own home, to save those of others. I'm wondering about the sounds and smells that, in a decade from now, will characterise this moment.

End of thread #Covid19 #StayAtHome #StayHomeSaveLives #Coronavirus