(Trigger warning: This article discusses eating disorders) Sue Grahame lost her daughter, Big Brother star Nikki, after a long struggle with anorexia. In an OK! exclusive, she bravely tells her story❤️
Nikki stopped eating her dinner shortly before her eighth birthday. “I’m not hungry,” she announced. Nothing major had happened, but overnight it was like she had become a sad, solemn, withdrawn little girl.
I used to be a fan of Karen Carpenter [an American singer who died in 1983 of anorexia, aged 32], so the word “anorexia” had crossed my mind. I thought it might be an eating disorder so I took her straight to the doctor. She’d tell me she needed to go for a walk after mealtimes and when I followed her out I’d see vomit on the pavement.
I drove her to the hospital and said, “I am not going anywhere. I will sit here for as long as it takes until you find my daughter a bed.” She spent the next eight years in and out of countless hospitals and institutions. She spent more time admitted than she did at home or at school. When she turned 18, things started looking up for a time. She got a job working on the Clarins counter in Harrods and loved it. She started going out with her friends and having fun and while she was burning the candle at both ends, I was happy she was having some semblance of a young person’s life.
Nikki had a break from her anorexia when she went into the Big Brother house and I’ll always be grateful for that because she deserved it. She missed out on her childhood because she was in and out of clinics and hospitals. Ironically, in that house, she got to be free. Before the pandemic hit, Nikki got a job as a dinner lady at a nearby school. She was also volunteering to help kids read in the classroom and had gone back to college to get a teaching assistant qualification.
I’d visit and she’d sit there talking to me with weights in her hands. Every now and again, she’d run up and down the stairs. I’d beg her not to and she’d say, “Mum, if I’m going to eat, this is what I have to do.” I spent most of the day massaging her feet. She had such bad water retention they were like balloons. I spent all day, every day with her.
As it turns out, I was the last person to speak to Nikki. On the day she died, she called me at 3.30am to tell me she’d made it to the bathroom with her new walking frame. I’ll never be able to forget watching her tiny frame being wheeled out of her bedroom in a body bag. I went down with her in the lift and just before they took her out of the building, I asked which end her head was at, and held it in my hands.
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