Next week is Eating Disorders Awareness Week. Lesley Bates talks to a mother who lives with the heartbreak of anorexia

RUTH worries that her daughter isn't eating enough. Most mothers do - in much the same way they fret periodically about whether their children are dressing up warmly enough.

But Ruth's concern for Laura goes deeper than that and the worry never goes away.

Laura, at 21, is tall, gauntly beautiful and weighs just five stone ten pounds.

She was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa when she was 17, although she probably stopped eating properly when she was 13.

Around that time she and her family moved from London to Salisbury and her father was working away from home for long periods, but there was nothing major that Ruth can pinpoint that might have triggered the disease.

"I'd love to know why but I don't think there is a reason," she says.

"I do wish people wouldn't call it a slimmer's disease - they say they started to slim and couldn't stop and it's not that.

Control

"It's a need to control an element of their lives.

"None of them believe they could die and, because Laura didn't die, a lot of people don't believe it was as serious as it was."

Ruth blames herself for failing to notice anything was wrong.

"I didn't want it to be happening and shut it out," she acknowledges.

"Laura became a vegetarian at 15 - that's very common with an anorexic because it gives them food they don't have to eat.

"She also suffers from migraines and that's another lot of food to avoid."

In 1999, Laura's school was sufficiently concerned to alert Ruth.

At Christmas of that year, Ruth noticed Laura's thinness when she wore a backless dress to the Snowball.

The following month, Laura went into hospital for a minor operation.

Ruth recalls: "I was getting her into a hospital gown and I thought 'My God'....

"I'd cuddled her, seen her in the bath and I didn't notice.

"It makes you feel dreadful that you have no idea."

Dieticians and psychiatrists took over.

Terminally ill

"We were told she was terminally ill by the psychiatrist," Ruth says quietly.

"She wanted her in hospital there and then, but Laura didn't want to go in.

"On Tuesday, she started vomiting.

"On Wednesday, she was taken in and got worse and worse.

"On Friday, they told me she wouldn't last the night and that was the worst time of my life - it was horrible, horrible, horrible."

Laura survived and has been a patient at The Priory Hospital at Marchwood and at Kimmeridge Court at St Ann's Hospital in Poole.

Currently she is living with her boyfriend in Salisbury and continuing her studies, but her weight fluctuates and emotional upsets can send it spiralling down again.

"I'm like every other mother of an anorexic, worrying about how things will affect her. It's hateful," says Ruth.

"As a parent, you tread on eggshells asking what they've eaten, sitting down with them and making them eat."

Support

Ruth found the parents and carers' groups at both hospitals an invaluable source of support.

"It was people who live with them saying how awful it was.

"People think they will go into hospital, put on weight and everything will be sorted out, but it's not like that. It won't be - there are years of hell you go through.

"It's awful for other members of the family because it's not the sufferer's illness alone."

She says that most people are supportive but eventually sympathy overload kicks in and people have enough of hearing that you are unable to cope.

Ruth worries about the physical knock-ons from starving your body, the muscle wasting, potential damage to heart and liver, and the irreversible damage to bone development.

Ruth says: "Laura will always have to struggle with the anorexia.

"There will be times when she copes. I think she'll survive. I don't fear for her life now."

But she still lives on tenterhooks waiting for the periodic calls that tell her Laura has collapsed at college.

Ruth's message to other parents is stark.

"Watch your children, watch what they eat.

"Don't let it take hold."