I visit my friend's grandma sometimes. One day, she told me a story that I cannot forget. She used to be a nurse, during the 1930s to maybe 1960s, I don't know what's the time period for sure, but it was during a period of time when women committed suicide by drinking acid.
Grandma used to be nurse and she trained at a ward that housed the depressing patients who attempted suicide. It was during a period of time when the people who attempted suicide tended to choose dying by drinking acid. The idea was to have the acid burn up the internal organs, resulting in death. It must have been a very painful process.
For those patients in the hospitals, their suicides attempts must have failed. To fail in an attempt to kill oneself by drinking acid was to have to live with a disfigured face, burnt esophagus, and possibly damaged internal organs. If living was hard before, it was sure to be worse after. It was not uncommon then, for patients to attempt suicides in the hospitals.
That was what grandma was telling us about, on that day. That when she was working there, she was a bit bothered with possibly being surprised by hanging dead bodies behind a door.
A minor detail that she casually included in her account of dead people was that there was this particular woman, who drank acid, and whose insides were so badly damaged that she couldn't eat, and grandma, being her nurse, had to feed her by pumping milk up her anus.
"Er, grandma... wait... what? How did you feed someone by the anus?" I had to make her back track.
"Ya, like enema. Enema, you know? Like just pump the milk up her anus until it reached the stomach. Because her throat was so badly damaged that she couldn't eat la. Poor thing, she was as thin as a stick. These women, they mostly did it because of men, you know? Heartbroken and all that. I wonder what happened to her... the soldiers came around then and I had to go away..."
(For Gary's grandma. And the woman mentioned.)
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