‘Take Away’ is about Hannah, a fifteen-year-old struggling with ME in small town Sussex in 1990. It’s a personal story, as I was ill with ME in my mid-twenties during the same period. Hannah suffers disbelief and hostility about her illness, sometimes from classmates, but mostly from some care professionals, doctors and social workers. I was fortunate in that I suffered far less unhelpful attitudes than Hannah, though some of my friends found my diagnosis difficult to deal with and would suggest I just needed to be more positive and get on with life as there was nothing seriously physically wrong with me. Given I was mentally and physically disabled, completely exhausted, unable to read, confined to bed most of the time, often needing a wheelchair when I was outside, this rejection could be depressing and alienating, making me even question whether my pragmatic realist (rather than unquestioningly positive) approach was making things worse.

I wrote about my experience of illness in an essay ‘Monty Modlyn’ which was published in 2021 in A Wild and Precious Life – A Recovery Anthology. My own experiences informed ‘Take Away’ but for dramatic purposes I turned up the threat and alienation she faced, so that Hannah and her family were actually in fear (as some families were back then and still are!) that she might be taken into care. Her illness wasn’t understood or believed by her doctors, and her parents were therefore seen as colluding with her delusion of being ill, enabling her retreat from life. A social worker friend who read an early draft of the story was disappointed by the negative portrayal of social services – ‘there must have been someone who could and would have helped,’ she felt.

Having ME as an adult, I never had to deal with social services, so my depiction is imaginative, anecdotal, inspired by teenagers I’d met and talked to, and by others I’d read about. However, Hannah and her parent’s traumatic experience at the hand of a sadistic and imperious doctor in A&E is an almost verbatim account of what happened to me (though I was there alone) in the early stage of my illness. I was sent home and instructed to seek psychological help, only to be admitted into hospital two days later with double pneumonia. After this, unlike Hannah, I received consistently helpful medical care, despite doctors becoming nearly as exasperated as I was that my health problems weren’t easily resolving.

I consciously made Hannah younger than me and female to give some distance from my own experiences. Unconsciously, perhaps, I specifically made her fifteen, a few years older than my own teenage daughters – a similar age group but with enough distance from their actual ages for her not to be too like them. Seeing my own daughters with their friends, I placed Hannah within a tight friendship group, with its push and pull energies and dynamics, rejections and misunderstandings, laughter and love.

Hannah’s parents are sometimes hapless but are loving and always on her side. Friends can often mean even more than family at fifteen, and her greatest support comes from her best friend Yasmine – together they can conquer the world. Hannah’s strongest personal asset is her feistiness – she’s a teenager after all – but this sometimes alienates people around her and has even annoyed some people who’ve read the story. She’s not always likeable but I hope she’s three dimensional and real, her spirit to fight and question things making her a compelling, believable narrator.

I set out to write a story about ME but didn’t plan the plot or timeline before I started, only having a vague sense of her character, and placing her in a bedroom not unlike the one I’d convalesced in at my parent’s flat. When I did start, I couldn’t stop and wrote the story over two days. Subsequently, I cut a few scenes, edited typos and dodgy lines and phrases as best I could, and the published story is close to its first draft. I tend to write in a series of bursts once I have a character and voice in mind and let things evolve from there. In this case, I had so much emotion and experience informed by my life to unpack, writing became even more of a dam burst, a rush of feeling and attitude.

Older versions of the story had been praised but declined (the soft rejection) by several journals, and, in the age of Long Covid, its echoes and similarities to ME, with hostility still from some in the medical profession, I was doubly determined to get it published. I edited it down a little and simplified the timeline to hopefully give greater impact, and make it resonate more with a reader. I’m grateful to John Lavin for taking it on, and hope in some small way that it might offer an insight into the experience of living with what are increasingly common and complex post viral conditions, the ways lives can be upturned, sometime even ruined.

There is no happy end to Hannah’s situation but she’s a fighter supported by her parents and her best friend. She has a chance.

Alan McCormick lives in Wicklow. He’s a trustee of the stroke charity InterAct Stroke Support, who employ actors to read fiction and poetry to stroke patients.

As well as The Lonely Crowd, his writing has featured in many publications, including Best British Short Stories, The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Southword, Exacting Clam, Confingo, Popshot, Poetry Bus and Sonder; and online at Dead Drunk Dublin, Époque Press, Books Ireland, 3:AM Magazine, Fictive Dream, Trasna and Words for the Wild. His story ‘Fire Starter’ came second in 2022’s RTÉ Francis MacManus Story Competition, and ‘Boys on Film’ was runner up in 2023’s Plaza Sudden Fiction Prize. His story collection, Dogsbodies and Scumsters, which included flash pieces illustrated by the artist Jonny Voss, was longlisted in the Edge Hill Prize. He’s recently completed his second story collection and a book of memoir essays with the assistance of an Irish Arts Council Literature Award.