A High Court judge has pleaded with a young woman suffering from anorexia to help him and her medical team save her life.
Mr Justice David Nolan, before making life-saving orders permitting her force-feeding by doctors and nurses, spoke personally with the woman who said she wants only to be allowed to die.
The judge, speaking to the woman in her mid-20s in her Dublin hospital bed, addressed her by her first name and said: “You know I’m placed in a very difficult position.”
The woman replied: “I know.”
When he told the ill and dangerously underweight woman that he had a constitutional obligation to look after her in circumstances where it was clear she lacked capacity for making decisions for her own health, she said: “Yeah.”
She told Mr Justice Nolan that while she could not see him, and had been listening throughout to the in-camera court proceedings, she could hear everything he was saying.
After hearing evidence of the woman currently being force fed, Judge Nolan told her: “I know you are going through an awful lot of pain and all I can do is empathise with you.”
“Everyone is working to save your life and before I made any orders I wanted to talk to you personally”
He said the orders he was going to make, permitting sedation and physical restraint if necessary to allow continued feeding through a gastric tube, were, while extremely intrusive, for her benefit.
Mr Justice Nolan told the woman, who now weighs only 37.5kg, that the court had heard in evidence she had been treated in hospital in 2023 for refusing to eat, and she had got well.
“I have no doubt if you listen to the doctors and psychiatrists, and everybody who loves you so much, you will get better again,” he said.
He said he had to vindicate her constitutional rights to live and would make court orders for as short a period of time as possible.
“Everyone is working to save your life and before I made any orders I wanted to talk to you personally,” Judge Nolan said.
“All we are trying to do is to get you into a healthy position where you can make decisions that will save your life.”
Mr Justice Nolan told barrister Sarah McKechnie, who appeared with Byrne Wallace Shields Solicitors for the hospital where the woman is being monitored and cared for, that he was satisfied on the evidence it was appropriate to make the orders which the hospital sought.
The court heard that the woman had expressed a wish to die stating she had suffered from anorexia since she was 14 and believed her life could not be saved by medical intervention. She required a minimum of 1,400 calories a day but had simply refused to eat anything orally and would die within several weeks if not fed by gastric tube.
She felt the treatment she was undergoing was a waste of time and a waste of HSE money. Her disease was telling her she could not survive her illness and did not require a weight gain plan.
Mr Justice Nolan was told that only on one occasion since being admitted to hospital had she to be gently restrained by hospital security.
The matter will return to court on 28 January for review.
