Chanelle Hayes - Baring My Heart by Chanelle Hayes Read Free Book Online Page B

the stuff these days makes me feel queasy and I haven’t been able to swallow tablets properly since then either.
    I have no idea how many pills I took but it must have been about 20. With the hammering on the door becoming more and more frantic and the booze and tablets starting to take hold, I decided to go one step further. I went to the bathroom cabinet and reached for my dad’s razor.
    I sat on the edge of the bath and began stroking the blade across my left wrist. I watched in some kind of semi-conscious trance as the blood sprung from my veins and ran over my arm in thin streaks, covering my fingers and dripping onto the floor. God, it stung so badly. It was absolute agony. The cuts weren’t very deep but I’ve never known pain like that and I still have the small scars on my wrist today.
    You might be wondering if I secretly liked the pain I was inflicting on myself but, in all honesty, I absolutely hated it. Thiswas not about self-harm for me, where you cut yourself to let stuff out and make yourself feel better. I wasn’t doing it for relief, I just didn’t know how else to make myself heard.
    It must have been about then that I passed out – from a combination of the blood loss and the effects of the pills and whisky, I guess. Fortunately, my parents had already called an ambulance and, as it raced towards our house, Dad managed to force open the bathroom door with a knife.
    ‘No! Chanelle! What have you done?’ he screamed as they barged into the room and found me lying almost lifeless on the floor. They wrapped my wrist with a towel to stem the bleeding and, thank God, the ambulance arrived moments later. I was rushed to Wakefield General Hospital and taken straight through to have my stomach pumped. Obviously, I was out cold through all of this, so the only recollection I have after blacking out is of waking up in my hospital bed, feeling thoroughly dazed and sick. When I did come round, I remember looking down at my bandaged arm, wondering, ‘What the hell was I thinking?’
    As the reality hit home, one of the doctors told me, ‘You’re a very lucky girl. If you’d taken many more tablets, you wouldn’t have had the choice of living or dying. Your organs would have been so messed up that you wouldn’t have stood a chance.’
    I couldn’t believe I had come that close to dying, and just wanted to get out of the hospital. The doctors and nurses kept coming over to put tubes in my arms, or write a list of confusing figures on their clipboards, and I’d continually ask, ‘Can I go home now?’
    ‘Not yet,’ they told me, again and again. ‘The effects of the tablets can take a while to show up and sometimes they can cause long-term damage to your insides – even days after the overdose.’
    This was the last thing I wanted to hear and a small part of meactually wished I had died. At least then there would have been a point to it. But, as it was, I felt like I’d failed and that people would think I had only done it as a pathetic cry for attention. That was mortifying when all around me on the ward there were really poorly children suffering from cancer and terminal illness they had no control over. I kept thinking, ‘You selfish cow, Chanelle. At least you have your health, unlike these poor little things.’
    When Mum and Dad came to see me, I just burst into tears as they approached my bed.
    ‘Hello, Jadey-pie,’ Dad said and smiled. ‘How’s my girl doing?’
    Mum sat and held my hands and I couldn’t understand why they weren’t furious with me.
    ‘I’m OK,’ I said with a shrug, wiping away tears. ‘Aren’t you mad at me?’
    They shook their heads and said, ‘We just want you to be well. Nothing else matters.’
    ‘So you don’t hate me for doing this?’
    ‘Of course not,’ said Mum. But, like before, they really didn’t want to dwell on my behaviour. ‘Look, we just want you home,’ she said. ‘We don’t need to talk about why you did it. We can just put it