'My eating disorder was so severe I ended up in intensive care - now I've turned my life around'

A young woman who ended up in intensive care due to a severe eating disorder has turned her life around to follow her dream of becoming a nurse.

Paige Rivers, 23, was rushed to hospital in Manchester just before the age of 19 with first stage kidney failure after her health drastically deteriorated.

The young woman, originally from Worcestershire was first anorexia at the age of 10 and from the age of 13 to 19 spent a maximum of six weeks out of hospital.

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Doctors believed Paige's eating disorder began from childhood trauma. At first, Paige explained how naïve she was as she didn’t know what an eating disorder was.

Speaking to the ECHO, she said: “When I was 13, I was first hospitalised and this is when it got much more severe. I never seemed to get better, I just seemed to get worse and relapse more quickly when I came out of hospital.

“I completed my GCSE’s in hospital, I taught myself everything.” But when Paige was 17, she began with mental health problems due to her low weight and the fact she had been tube fed for a long time which had ‘caused a lot of issues’.

Nearly two years later, just before Paige was 19, she got sent across the country to a hospital in Manchester and relapsed “hard and fast and ended up in ICU with first stage kidney failure and was very, very unwell.” She explained: “I pulled through. I’m not sure how but I pulled through and then ended up in a specialist hospital in London where I spent the next two years.

“In that admission, I