The Nurse: An Interview of Extremes - Part 2

The door creaked open, allowing the comfortably furnished apartment to push and elbow the utilitarian, hollow corridor with stark contrast. Then, the fluorescent silhouette of a figure carrying a tray, battled their way against the wrathful fire-door mechanism and into the room to the sound of crockery shivering.

“Maisey,” Isabella, “ Where on earth have you been?”

“Sorry Miss Beauchamp. Tea for two, Miss Beauchamp?”

Isabella nodded toward the middle of the table. The young girl leaned forward with the tray of tea-making paraphernalia, her trembling arms causing the ceramic cups to chime with anxiety against the metal of the large, catering style tea-pot.

Maisey retreated, but once again Isabella gave a sturdy, insisting nod towards the tray. I watched as the thin, spindly girl began to fumble with the cups. Her uniform showed very little shape, except for a heavy and poorly supported bust that was too large for her fragile frame, and put excessive stress on the uniform. Her fiery ginger hair was held up with a claw clip, and it jostled for freedom with her movements. The green of her eyes glimmered as they darted over the tray, her lips pursed. After a few moments, two cups of fresh, steaming tea waited before us. Isabella gave the junior nurse a look of thunder.

“Maisey, you know how I have my tea?”

“Y-yes, Miss Beauchamp.”

“But you didn’t ask our guest, did you Maisey? He may want his tea different.”

“Oh, sh-... sorry, Miss Beauchamp. I didn’t…”

“Listen Maisey, we’ve been through this, haven’t we? If I am your subject, and I want a pink glazed doughnut with sprinkles, then I better not get a Goddamn blueberry doughnut with cream filling, had I? You give them what they want, when you want to. The sooner you understand that, the sooner you’ll be given a full-time subject, okay?”

Maisey avoided eye contact with us both, preferring to look over her ill-fitting swell of bust and instead at the tips of her shoes. She nodded solemnly in recognition, her lean, brittle figure looking as though it may shatter with tension at any moment.

“Maisey,” Isabella announced, this time with more upbeat authority, “I want you to head down to Testing Suite 19. Sign in and be on standby to support in whatever role may be needed. It’s Subject 606488, I believe - they’ve been pushing her pretty hard to keep gaining, but she’s escalated to a Code 8 and it is painfully clear that she’s reaching her limits. Do what is needed, understood?”

The young junior nurse bucked up to attention, “Yes, Miss Beauchamp, right away!”

We both watched as Maisey left the room with excitable urgency, allowing the door to slam shut on its over-enthusiastic mechanism.

“She’s one to watch, is Maisey.” Nurse Isabella continued, settling back down and cradling her hot cup of tea, “Not in a bad way, as such. She will go far. Maisey just needs to learn the process a little more, learn how to pace herself, and listen, but she’s got it in her. I've got plans for Maisey.”

Isabella leaned across the table toward me, encouraging me to lean in, too. In a whispered tone, she confessed, “Fattened her eldest sister - to immobility! Her own sister! She would have kept going, too. The only reason they found out was because she had stopped attending school to look after her sister full time. No idea about her Mum or Dad - A.W.O.L, I believe, sadly. Story goes, eventually they broke down the door to the house, and she weighed almost one-thousand pounds. They had to take a wall out. This is the thing though; the house itself was pretty much spotless - neat, tidy, clean - not like the rat-infested hell hole you’d imagine a situation like that to be. She can work hard, that’s for sure! As for the sister thing… well, it’s a bit weird, but I think it's purely opportunistic. By her sister’s own admission she had always been a big girl, and Maisey just seemed to enjoy encouraging that, took advantage of it, and in some ways I can empathise a little. She faced prosecution, however, The Facility heard about her predicament and offered her a position here, as an alternative to a hefty jail stretch. Community service, I guess, but one that she actually enjoys!”

“Sorry, where were we?” Apologised Isabella, “Oh yes, so, when I finally left college, there weren’t many jobs about. It was rubbish, really. However, I managed to get a position doing care work; you know, visiting sick or elderly people's homes to help them with day-to-day stuff or administering medication and such. Not very glamorous, sure, but it was something. I had completed a couple of modules of Health & Social Care at School, and my Aunty worked as a Nurse for most of her career, so I didn’t hate the idea. If anything, it was quite boring.”

“My first client was a really sweet old gent named Stanley. He used to give me a bit of extra cash to top up the mediocre hourly pay. In all honesty, I think he just enjoyed having a young lady in a nurse uniform turn up everyday. I can still hear his smokey laugh now - he knew some very offensive jokes! Sadly, he ended up going into full time care, and so I was allocated an old-ish lady called Margret. She was a bit of a contrast, quite violent in fact. Truthfully, she made me want to quit, but I hung in there. Eventually, Margret was dropped by the care company I worked for after numerous complaints, and so I was moved to my third client. This is all in the space of about seven or eight months so far.”

“My third client was, well, wow. The first time I was introduced to her, my heart was pounding so hard I was worried that she would hear it! It was a live-in care arrangement, so I would be there twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with some time to do my own errands and relief on certain days - although I soon volunteered to work those days too!”

“Her name was Sara, she was almost forty, and she was huge. A real life huge woman. Instantly I found myself obsessed with her. Close to seven hundred pounds, if I remember correctly, and largely immobile without assistance. Beautiful, too. Big, heavy, and beautiful. I got on well with Sara.”

“She came into my care because she was actually waiting to undergo further consultation for gastric band surgery. However, due to her extreme weight - she told me she’s peaked at 715 - she needed to be kept on a calorie controlled diet until she had lost a significant amount. I tried my best, honest to God, I tried to keep her weight-loss plan on track. Eventually, it derailed completely, I just couldn’t do it, I could not resist.”

“It all started by gradually increasing the portions of her set daily meals, and Sara just didn’t notice, or care. Then, I’d offer her a treat - something for dessert, or a snack during the day, and whilst apprehensive, she would eat it. It turned out that neither of us seemed able to help ourselves when it came to suppressing our deepest urges. And so, she began gaining weight rather than losing it. Soon enough she had exceeded her own record, and still continued to grow heavier. She hated the diet, she hated the restriction, and we both knew it. Washing her was skin to worship; relishing the softness of her over-fattened figure, feeling for new pockets of fat, searching for new stretch marks, listening to her gasp under her own increasing weight! Sara lived on her phone, and she could have easily complained to my manager, but she didn’t.”

“Life was great, and then it wasn’t. After three months, I was due a quarterly review by my area manager. The review is for both the nurse, and the most recent patient. I was in big trouble. The routine weigh-ins I had, of course, falsified to show that she had lost weight. My own secret notebook, however, showed that Sara was around 745 pounds at a minimum! To her credit, and I still have no idea why she did it, but Sara played dumb - perhaps it was to reinforce her innocence that she believed that she had been on a calorie controlled diet, I’m not sure. The physical evidence couldn’t be overlooked though, and Sara was struggling more than ever with her size. Estimations were that she had gained almost sixty pounds in those twelve or so weeks, believe it or not. I was dismissed on the spot, of course, and even faced legal action from the company, although I have a feeling that Sara may have played a part in helping that get dropped.”

“For the most part I think both myself and Sara enjoyed that little blip in time, perhaps both knowing full well that it would never be long term. Even so, I still imagine to this day how she would have developed had we, you know,  just been able to continue.” Isabella sipped her tea and sighed, before returning the cup to the table and resting her chin in her hand, “So then I found myself not only out of work, but also blacklisted from any other caring or nursing role. Well, almost any. It was a real low point though. Rumours spread about what I’d ‘done’ to Sara, and that just spurred even more false tittle-tattle, you know? My friends distanced themselves, even my parents were casting serious shadow, and in a small town like mine, I dreaded leaving the house.”

“At that moment in time, I really didn’t know what to do with myself. Then I received a phone call. This would be maybe two weeks after my dismissal, with the threat of legal action still hanging over me. The call was from a government department, and they wanted to know if I was interested in an interview for an undisclosed role. Apparently, they had been reviewing my ‘file’, and thought I would be a good candidate. To my knowledge, I hadn’t even bothered applying for any other jobs since I was sacked, so it came as a bit of a surprise for sure. Just happy to have an opportunity, I agreed.”

“The rest, of course, is history, as they say. I was offered a junior position here, and I didn’t feel that I had anything to stay for back home, and so I left it behind. In truth, this facility is so secretive that I’m not actually sure where I am, but over the years I found that to be a comfort more than anything else. I’m a new person, in a new place, and I’m doing what I’m good at, what I enjoy.”

“Because my skill set was already somewhat proven, I suppose you might say, I thankfully only had to spend my eight week probation as a junior nurse, with it being a formality that I would be promoted to nurse, albeit an entry level one, shortly afterwards. That’s how I started my journey climbing up the ranks, I guess. Now, as a Junior Nurse, you aren’t actually fixed to a department as such, more usually it’s an individual - a head of a department, such as myself, or even an entire wing. This means that you can be dispatched to many departments or to shadow various staff members, giving plenty of variety, even if some of the tasks are somewhat mundane.” Isabella smiled, gesturing at the steadily cooling teapot, “Take young Maisey, for example; I’ve just dispatched her to a Testing Suite that isn’t even under my jurisdiction. That department simply raised their alert to a Code 8, and flagged for any extra staff to be sent down there just… well, just in case. Maisey could be posted there for a few hours, a few days, or I can call her back to do something else, the main thing is that she gains experience. Serving us tea might seem an irrelevant task, but she’s actually learning to cater to specific needs - at least, she should be.”

“Last month I turned twentynine,” Isabella continued, “So I’ve been here eleven years or so now, and a majority of that has been spent as a typical Nurse, to some degree or other. When you graduate from a Junior Nurse to a Qualified Nurse, you more often than not get assigned to a specific Department, and for new Nurses, often just a single subject in a single Testing Suite. As you gain experience and further qualification, you often end up covering multiple subjects, but to begin with, it’s just the one, so you can really focus on the whole process, if that makes sense?”

“My first subject was fantastic; Emily Pearce, number 307311. A touch shorter than me, plump, but not much bigger than myself really, and she had the most gorgeous smile and lush, mid-length mousy hair. She was about 21 when she arrived with us; her story went that she had bought a sporty little red number and accumulated a hefty wad of speeding tickets with it. The fine was apparently ridiculous, and Emily couldn’t afford it, what with the car payments, and she didn’t fancy the other alternative either - jail time. However, she was allowed to volunteer for a research program here, and, I assume someone did some digging in some records somewhere, and discovered that she might be a good fit for this area of the Facility. Spoiler alert; she was.”

“I don’t even think I’m doing her justice by saying that. Emily was incredible. A natural gainer. She protested plenty at first, most people do, but once you had found a way to work with her greedy nature, break her walls down, bit-by-bit, she began to gain weight in a way I’d only fantasised about. Her gorgeous little body blossomed as it packed on the pounds, going from plump, to big, to huge with increasing pace. By the time she reached about 500 pounds, she’d given up protesting and instead relished the attention of the team, and the freedom to indulge herself without guilt or negative judgement.”

“It’s important to remember that the staff in these departments spend a lot of time with their subjects, and almost always we become not only friends, but even family to these individuals - usually better than the ones they already have. They get attention, socialisation and acceptance, which are things that society seems quite bad at providing. It’s not so much a ‘hey, lay here and get fat’ but rather a ‘hey, join our team, take part, be someone’, you know?”

“Once Emily relaxed, she really began to blow up. It was like watching a drug addict get their fix over and over, each mouthful pushing them on to ever increasing highs, and oh boy, did Emily get hooked. She knew what she was doing, she knew what was happening, but she just couldn't stop herself. She just kept on stuffing that poor little body of hers, overfeeding it until exhaustion. Then when she gave up? That's right, she'd let us continue to keep feeding her, jaw aching as she gave into her most base desire to over-indulge. To hear a girl who weighs over 1,000 pounds, pinned to the bed by her own heaving weight and still moaning for ‘more’ is just - just incredible.”

As Isabella retold her tale, I was captivated by her passion and enthusiasm for both her job and her subject. The story was to be cut short though - at least for now - as an urgent sounding alarm came through on the intercom, paired with the equally obnoxious buzzing of her pager.

“Shit! It's Hope! You - you haven't met her yet,” the flustered nurse explained, “She's one of mine. A real star. Suite 222. I think I might have to just go and attend, briefly.”

Isabella reached over and pressed the button on the intercom, “On my way!”

“I've got a minute,” she reassured me, “they just want me on standby. Hope is just, well, reaching her limits, we think. In fact, she seemed to be at her limit months ago, but somehow she just keeps on gaining. She makes Bethany look svelte! She's enormous! We're being as delicate as we can with her, but in reality, we are sailing into the unknown, at least as far as her data is concerned. It's a bit like pumping up a balloon…”

As the nurse downed her last mouthful of tea, she noticed my eyebrow raised quizzically. “Well, if we don’t have data to work from, or it doesn't make sense, then we have to go by observation and feel. Blowing up a balloon is one analogy we use to train our staff - it’s simple, but gets the point across. To begin with, unless the balloon has a defect, you can pretty much go ham, really get that pump going. Eventually though, you have to slow it down a little, until finally it is so big and full that you need to listen out for each and every creak of the rubber, feel how taut it is, look for any signs it may have reached a hard limit. You're barely moving the balloon pump at all - only the slightest, most gentle of movements - constantly listening and feeling. Does that make any sense?”

“Well, that's how we've had to treat Hope these past few months. The data suggests she shouldn't have been able to get any heavier, yet… yet she's still growing. So we keep pushing on, wondering when we'll find her limit. She throws up plenty of warnings, but she seems to overcome them… oh heck! That reminds me, I must dash…”

With that, the full hipped nurse blustered her way out of the apartment with brisk pace. Then, the apartment fell silent, aside from the brief chime of glassware in the kitchenette cupboards as the door slammed shut. Whilst I waited for Isabella's return, I decided to stretch my legs and have a wander around the somewhat tidy and reasonably well-appointed apartment. Maybe I could learn a little more about Nurse Isabella whilst she was away attending to her subject…

Continued in… Part 3